Artificial intelligence

MMF MMXXIV: LAWRENCE LEK

The Milan Machinima Festival is excited to present Lawrence Lek’s Theta as part of our Auteur’s Theory program. Join us for a special screening on March 15 2024 at IULM University.

Theta immerses viewers in the journey of a self-driving police car grappling with an existential crisis within the desolate streets of SimBeijing, an abandoned smart city. In the absence of its intended purpose and under relentless scrutiny, Theta seeks solace in conversations with its integrated therapist, a self-help AI named Guanyin. However, the seemingly deserted SimBeijing, originally conceived as a duplicate of the Chinese capital for autonomous vehicle trials, harbors secrets that are gradually uncovered. As Theta confides in Guanyin, the narrative unveils the grim realities that led to the city's abandonment. This stunning work is a continuation of Lawrence Lek’s Sinofuturist universe, delving into themes of identity, surveillance, and empathy within the technological age.

Lawrence Lek, based in London, is an artist, filmmaker, and musician renowned for his innovative use of video game engines, simulation, and architecture. He employs worldbuilding as a method of collage, blending elements from physical and digital realms to weave narratives around alternate histories and potential futures. Lek initiated his cinematic universe with the groundbreaking video essay “Sinofuturism (1839–2046 AD)” in 2016, where he examines the intricate relationship between geopolitics and technology. This narrative envisions a future that merges China and its diaspora with the concept of artificial intelligence, pondering on how these forces shape our understanding of the world. Through his work, Lek speculates on granting agency to marginalized entities: in Geomancer (2017), a satellite dreams of artistic creation, while AIDOL (2019) explores the dynamics between a declining pop star and an ambitious AI songwriter. His creations challenge viewers to reflect on the impending contradictions between natural and artificial life, erasing geographical and existential boundaries. Lek extends his artistic expression through composing soundtracks and performing live audio-visual mixes that accompany his films and open-world games, such as 2065 (ongoing since 2018) and Nøtel"(a collaboration with Kode9, ongoing since 2015). Notable soundtrack releases include Temple OST (The Vinyl Factory, 2020) and AIDOL OST (Hyperdub, 2020). His work has been showcased in solo exhibitions across prestigious venues, including Ghostwriter at CCA Prague (2019), Farsight Freeport at HeK, Basel (2019), Nøtel at UKR, Essen (2019), AIDOL at Sadie Coles HQ, London (2019), and 2065 at K11, Hong Kong (2018). His work Unreal Estate (The Royal Academy is Yours) was presented in the context of GAME VIDEO/ART. A SURVEY at IULM University in 2016.

Read more about the 7th edition of the Milan Machinima Festival

MMF MMXXIV: STEFAN PANHANS AND ANDREA WINKLER

We are excited to feature Stefan Panhans and Andrea Winkler’s »If You Tell Me When Your Birthday Is« (Machinima version) at the 2024 edition of the Milan Machinima Festival.

Stefan Panhans and Andrea Winkler’s »If You Tell Me When Your Birthday Is« (Machinima version) merges 3D scanning, CGI, avatars, and motion capture with dialogue reflecting AI-driven communication, all set in a vibrantly constructed virtual world. This absurdist mini-drama, divided into three segments, employs real-time graphics to navigate through surreal landscapes - from a BMX course cluttered with office chairs to an otherworldly forest filled with giant pills. The narrative follows two characters wandering fantastical settings, their dialogue laden with misinterpretations and emotional depth, driven by digital patterns and AI mimesis. These avatars, combining 3D models with the actors’ facial scans, move through a series of visually striking, absurd environments that blur the lines between the digital and the physical. Produced during a fellowship at the Academy of Theatre and Digitality in Dortmund, the film critically examines the intricacies of communication with artificial intelligences that saturate modern life. It intentionally highlights the digital-analog conflict and the charming flaws of integrating these realms, rejecting seamless integration for a portrayal filled with comedic and eerie inaccuracies. Through this, »If You Tell Me When Your Birthday Is« (Machinima version) not only entertains but also probes the complexities of our increasingly digital existence.

Stefan Panhans and Andrea Winkler explore contemporary media and its effects on the mind and body through video, photography, installation, and text. Panhans (born in Hattingen, Germany) undertakes a mental archaeology of hyper mediatization and digitalization, examining their influence on the mind and power relations in society. His work also engages with racism, celebrity worship, stereotypes, and diversity. He studied at Hochschule für Bildende Künste Hamburg. Winkler (born in Fällanden, Zurich, Switzerland) examines similar themes through sculpture, video, and installation. She studied at Slade School of Fine Art in London under John Hilliard and Bruce McLean, after completing a degree in Visual Communication at Hochschule für Bildende Künste Hamburg under Wolfgang Tillmans and Gisela Bullacher. Together, the duo create interdisciplinary works that critically investigate contemporary media culture and human-technology interactions through experimental aesthetics. Their collaborations take the form of video, performance, and installation. Their 2016 video, À Rebours. Mod#1.I, was recently featured on VRAL.

Read more about the 7th edition of the Milan Machinima Festival

ARTICLE: THE ART OF THE SUBVERSIVE MOD

VRAL is currently showcasing Chris Kerich’s latest project Three Impossible Worlds. To accompany the exhibition, we are discussing several artworks that comprise his oeuvre. Today, we examine his conceptual mod GamePyg’s Face and Body Overhaul.

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Produced in 2021, GamePyg’s Face and Body Overhaul is a conceptual art project by Kerich that employs fictional mod listings and images to critically explore the entitlement, attitude, and control manifest in video game modding cultures. It represents both a continuation of and departure from Kerich’s previous game-based art.

Like earlier works, GamePyg interrogates the ideologies and assumptions embedded in gaming environments. Here the focus falls on modding communities and the gendered politics of editing female bodies and sexuality in games like The Witcher 3. Kerich fabricates an extreme future scenario involving AI-generated mod content to unpack player entitlement and anxieties around control.

However, unlike more abrasive works like Piles, GamePyg adopts an oblique, indirect approach using fictional texts and images. The project was initially posted on the popular modding site Nexus Mods posing as a real mod to engage that community. This can be seen as a more subtle, injection-based artistic intervention into a specific subculture compared to Kerich’s more disruptive previous pieces.

Certain themes carry over from earlier projects. For example, GamePyg continues Kerich’s interest in making visible the hidden values and meaning-making systems encoded in games, which is a stated goal of works like Three Impossible Worlds as well as Dynamic Kinetic Sculptures. The fictional mod explores how modding extends player assumptions about control, “ownership” and access to predominantly female bodies. And it makes use of fictional scenarios and imagery to probe the implications of emerging technologies like AI on gaming and gender representation.

At the same time, GamePyg distinguishes itself by targeting a specific sub-culture rather than gaming writ large…

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Matteo Bittanti

Works cited

Chris Kerich

GamePyg’s Face and Body Overhaul, mod, 2021

The mod can be downloaded from this URL

A full documentation of the project and the development process is available here

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ARTICLE: FREE WILL IN THE AGE OF AI

VRAL is currently showcasing Filip Kostic’s 2019 game video Filip Kostic VS. Filip Kostic in a brand new format. Today, we discuss Open Loop (2017), which explores the concept of agency and determinism through the use of an AI character trapped in a repetitive cycle.

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Open Loop is a massive, real time installation by Filip Kostic which examines the notion of agency and determinism through the use of an AI character stuck in a repetitive - and ultimately nihilistic - sequence. Here, the AI character’s actions and behaviors unfold in real-time, mirroring the interactivity found in video games and digital environments. The original installation at Roger’s Office gallery in Los Angeles utilized eight monitors in order to create an immersive and engaging visual experience for viewers, evoking the “man cave” milieu of hard core gamers. The custom-built computer functioned as the central nervous system of the installation. This was not just any computer: it was meticulously designed and crafted to meet the high computational requirements of the AI simulation. It sported neon lights, a hallmark of gaming PCs, serving both functional and aesthetic purposes. In Open Loop, the neon lights symbolize the intersection of art and technology, blurring the boundaries between gaming and artistic expression. The gaming PC also has a transparent cabinet,  allowing users – in this case, Kostic – to showcase the internal components, e.g., powerful GPUs. In an upcoming article, we will discuss Kostic’s fascination for the custom built pc as a modern day sculpture. In the context of the installation, these transparent cabinets invited viewers to contemplate the inner workings of the AI simulation and the technology that drives it.

As previously mentioned, Open Loop investigates the role of agency within AI systems. In this context, agency refers to the ability of an AI program or ”agent“, to make decisions based on its programming or training data. However, in Open Loop, the AI ”character“ lacks agency, as it is trapped in a predetermined, repetitive cycle of actions, unable to exercise free will. In this context, these actions or behaviors involve walking, dying, and respawning, all occurring devoid of any external control. 

Open Loop was originally conceived and developed in 2016, at a time when artificial intelligence was on the cusp of gaining cultural prominence and mainstream adoption. Back then, the artist was studying the design of Non-Player Characters (NPCs) in Unreal Engine and became fascinated by the limits of programmed behaviors. In many ways, he was ahead of his times: behavior trees in NPCs can now be seen as viral trends in livestreams and tiktoks where individuals mimic NPC behaviors, like Pinkydoll. His further research led him to explore the concepts of open and closed loop systems…

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Matteo Bittanti


Works cited

Filip Kostic

Open Loop

real-time AI simulation, eight monitors, custom built computer, custom GPU and CPU cooling loops, steel and acrylic structure, installed at Roger’s Office in Los Angeles, California, 2017

All images and videos courtesy of the Artist

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MMF MMXXIII UPDATE: A CHAT WITH LUCA GIACOMELLI

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The Milan Machinima Festival is delighted to present Luca Giacomelli’s, A Report for Humanity which adapts Kafka’s tale “A Report for an Academy”, using selected voiceovers to accompany imagery recorded from various video games such as Red Dead Redemption 2, GTA V, Space Explorer, Battlefield V, and FIFA 23. Featured in the Made in Italy program, Giacomelli's work will be available between March 19-26 2023 exclusively on the MMF website.

Luca Giacomelli was born in 1995 and he is currently enrolled in the New Technologies of Art Program at the Academy of Fine Arts in Carrara, Italy. His main interests are cinema, photography, and video art. He directed several shorts, including Dogs (2019, with Matteo Marchi), which was influenced by Werner Herzog, Andrei Tarkovskij, and Godfrey Reggio. His work What is Happening in Our City? was presented at the Milan Machinima Festival in 2020. Giacomelli lives and works in Carrara.

In the following interview, Giacomelli discusses the main inspirations behind his new artwork:

Matteo Bittanti: What inspired you to use Franz Kafka’s “A Report for an Academy” as a reference point for your latest machinima, and what drew you to the themes and messages of the story?

Luca Giacomelli: I have always been fascinated by poems and fiction — especially short stories — that succeed in describing, in a direct, raw, visceral and at the same time lucid and prophetic, the state and soul of humanity, both universally and individually. Examples includes Edgar Allan Poe’s short story “The Silence,” Guy de Maupassant’s “The Horla,” and several short stories by Kafka. Literature in general is what inspires me the most. Specifically, “A Report for an Academy” inspired me mainly because of the point of view in which one is forced to look, in an absolutely objective, realistic way, at the habits of human beings. Kafka chooses a monkey as an “empty vessel” to be filled with human customs and habits and as an impartial figure through whom he describes us, but it can also be seen as a point of view of an infant forced to live and deal with the so-called civilization in which he has to find a role and a task; of course “imitating” what is in front of him. And what does the narrator of Kafka’s story do but try to survive, adapting to his new environment? Through evolution into “civilized” man we have left behind the freedom of nature for the cage that is modern civilization, where our best chance of camouflage and survival comes from creating a kind of performance. All the monkey’s actions after his capture constitute a performance, but it is a performance that gradually becomes more conscious. What used to be instinctive has now turned into rational decision-making, and “performing” has changed from something it does to blend in to something it does to live.

Matteo Bittanti: How did you select the specific video games used in the artwork, and what factors did you consider as representative of “human habits, moments, and vicissitudes”? How does the use of video games as a medium highlight these themes and make them more accessible to a contemporary audience? How does the use of machinima and video games in this artwork challenge traditional artistic mediums and add a unique layer of meaning to Kafka’s story? What was the thought process behind choosing these particular games and how do they contribute to the artwork’s overall message? 

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Matteo Bittanti

Work cited

Luca Giacomelli

A Report for Humanity

digital video/machinima, color, sound, 4’ 27”, 2022, Italy

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MMF MMXXIII UPDATE: A CHAT WITH KENT SHEELY

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The Milan Machinima Festival is thrilled to announce the on-site screening of Kent Sheeely’s machinima Welcome Back. Sheely’s work offers a timely reflection on the highly anticipated return to “normalcy” following the global pandemic. Using Transport Fever (Urban Games, 2016) as his primary source material, Sheely masterfully appropriates and manipulates the game’s realistic infrastructure-building mechanics to create a thought-provoking exploration of the world that awaits us post-Covid.

At first glance, Transport Fever’s immersive gameplay mechanics appear to offer a straightforward and engaging experience, allowing players to construct and manage their own transportation networks across different eras. However, as Sheely suggests through his artful manipulation of the game’s content in order to trigger glitches and visual anomalies, the journey towards a state of “normalcy” may prove to be far more disconcerting and unsettling than we ever imagined.

Kent Sheely (b. 1984, United States) is a new media artist based in Los Angeles. His work draws both inspiration and foundation from the aesthetics and culture of video games, examining the relationships between real and imagined worlds. Much of his work centers around the translation and transmediation of symbols, concepts, and expectations from game space to the real world and vice versa, forming new bridges between simulation and lived reality.

Matteo Bittanti: As the Covid-19 pandemic continues to linger in our collective memory, it remains a paradoxical experience, insofar as it feels both fresh and remote. As an artist, how did you navigate this unprecedented moment in history? What were your personal encounters with this global crisis? Did it function as a harbinger of more catastrophic events to come, or was it “simply” a significant historical outlier? Moreover, how did you reconcile yourself with the concept of the “new normal,” and what coping mechanisms did you deploy to manage the tumultuous and ever-changing landscape of the pandemic? In essence, how did you perceive, process, and ultimately respond to this momentous period of crisis and upheaval that you represent with/in Welcome Back?

Kent Sheely: In March of 2020, I was working a full-time job in downtown Los Angeles, taking a bus to and from the office each day. When central management called to inform everyone we’d be working from home for a while (they thought it would only last a week!), it was just a fun change of pace for me and my coworkers at first; nobody knew how bad the spread of Covid already was, or that it would only get worse and impact our daily lives for years to come.

I quickly adjusted to doing the job from my home office, but after a few weeks of quarantine and constantly reading news about the escalating impact of the virus, cabin fever took hold and I actually got pretty depressed. Nobody knew when it would be over, or what the lasting effects would be, especially as weeks turned to months with no end in sight and no indication of how bad it would truly get. I tried to keep myself busy to curb the catastrophic thoughts and “what-ifs” that were constantly popping up. I spent a lot of time online with friends and found small projects for myself around the apartment, but I didn’t feel like making art for a really long time.

I eventually did find the motivation to start managing my feelings through my art practice, and the floodgates just opened up; there was a period where everything I made was in service of processing the tragedy and surreality of the new cursed world. Honestly I think that means of self-expression is what ended up helping me adjust the most.

Matteo Bittanti: As evidenced by Welcome Back, you have appropriated and manipulated Transport Fever to create a thought-provoking, visually stunning work of art. Could you share with us your personal connection to this particular simulation game and how it became a creative outlet for you? How did you negotiate the interplay between the mechanics of the game and your artistic vision, and ultimately leverage the affordances of the medium to give shape to your expression? Can you share your intent, methodology, and thought processes behind the production of this captivating machinima?

Kent Sheely: I was really into management simulators when I was younger, with games like SimCity 2000, Shortline Railroad and Rollercoaster Tycoon being a few early favorites. On a nostalgic lark a few years ago I picked up Transport Fever and spent quite a few evenings setting up and maintaining infrastructure between cities via road, rail, air and sea. I didn’t make my first artwork with the game until I moved to…

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Matteo Bittanti

Work cited

Kent Sheely

Welcome back

digital video, sound, 4’ 35”, 2022, United States of America

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MMF MMXXIII UPDATE: A CHAT WITH NANUT THANAPORNRAPEE

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The Milan Machinima Festival is proud to present Nanut Thanapornrapee’s This History is Auto-Generated: A Tale of Two Thailands which reinterprets Thailand’s political history with the aid of GPT-3, an AI text generator. A Tale of Two Thailand setting in an alternative future where Thailand is divided into two states: an anarchist state and a military shogunate. 

Nanut Thanapornrapee is a visual artist who uses essay images and a participatory approach to explore the meta-narrative and history of people and technology. He graduated in Journalism and Mass Communication (with a major in photography and filmmaking) at Thammasat University. In 2021 he participated with Baan Norg Collaborative Art and Culture to create HAWIWI: I Wish I Wrote a History which experiments on meta-narrative by writing a history of Ratchabur, a city in Western Thailand, via card game and participatory with locals including high schooler and elementary students. In 2021 he received the Prince Claus Seed Award and participated in a mobile lab program at Documenta 15.

Gemma Fantacci discussed This History is Auto-Generated: A Tale of Two Thailands with the artist:

Gemma Fantacci: In the words of Paul Marino, machinima refers to “the real-time production of animated films within a 3D virtual environment using video games.” However, recent year’s developments show how machinima has evolved into different formats, blending with other artistic languages, and thus taking a hybrid form. For some, it remains a technique, while for others it has become a medium in its own right, one in which gameplay and game space lose all connection to the original video game to be refunctionalized within counter narratives that reflect on instances related to today’s political and social situations, or on the problematic issues of video game culture. When did you find out about machinima for the first time and how did you begin to incorporate video game elements into your work?

Nanut Thanapornrapee: In the research phase of This History is Auto-Generated, I have read Alfie Bown’s The Playstation Dreamworld (2017), which discusses the tendency of video games to represent the capitalist ideology but also how video games could become an anti-capitalist tool as well. Therefore I started to research and contemplate video games from different perspectives, aside from entertainment, and especially game streaming content which is growing popular in Thailand. Many streamers create their own style of storytelling which is not limited to the context of the games they are playing, but implements their narratives as well. That is when I started to use machinima as one of my practices in this project. The juxtaposition of  several video games’ contexts creates bizarre experiences and alternative ways to interpret and represent narratives and history, which I find more enjoyable in terms of making and viewing.

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Gemma Fantacci

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NEWS: MMF MMXXIII: THEME, POSTER, AND TICKETS!

 
 

“NEITHER ARTIFICIAL NOR INTELLIGENT” IS THE THEME OF THE SIXTH EDITION OF THE MILAN MACHINIMA FESTIVAL

Milan, Italy - Today, January 19 2023, we are delighted to unveil the theme and poster of the upcoming edition of the Milan Machinima Festival which will take place both on site and online between March 19 - 26 2023.

“Neither Artificial Nor Intelligent” (NANI) is how Kate Crawford— research professor of communication and science and technology studies at the University of Southern California and a senior principal researcher at Microsoft Research — describes artificial intelligence in her award-winning book Atlas of AI (2021). According to Crawford, “AI is neither artificial nor intelligent. It is made from natural resources and it is people who are performing the tasks to make the systems appear autonomous.”

Likewise, the new edition of the Milan Machinima Festival will address the growing influence of artificial intelligence on storytelling and visual narrative, but also the rhetoric surrounding this technique. Such a theme is consistent with the current VRAL exhibition, Colossal Cave Adventure - The Movie, created by Thomas Hawranke and Lasse Scherffig with AI-generated visuals. In this case, the AI system receives on an 8 second interval a new textual description taken from Will Crowther’s 1978 Colossal Cave Adventure’s source code and generates a new scene. The question then becomes: Who is the author of Colossal Cave Adventure - The Movie? Thomas Hawranke and Lasse Scherffig? Will Crowther? Stable Diffusion? All of them? None? As this example illustrates, AI-based art raises several questions related to authorship, creativity, originality and more. The 2023 edition of the Milan Machinima Festival will try to address the potential and pitfalls of this technique.

The festival’s poster was designed by Jordy Veenstra, one of the most talented artists working with machinima today. “The initial keywords given to me were NPC and AI”, said the Dutch artist and filmmaker. “In tandem with this year’s theme, my first thoughts were: pseudo-intelligence, digitization, dehumanization, empty shells, algorithms, compulsory movement and/or execution — as in NPC speech and movement —, the contrast between real/fabricated and the visualization of code.“

Consistently with this premise, Veenstra used AI-based tools to generate the artwork. As he explains: “The work was created with the Dall-E AI provided by OpenAI and in my eyes ideally captures this idea. White experimental, dehumanized masses looking like NPCs, with truly absurd poses; just standing there, surrounded by experimental ‘white’ code blobs; simply looking around restlessly and waiting for someone, anyone, to give a quest to, to be useful and to have their code finally executed. To have their own quest completed.”

Patron supporters can access to additional content related to Veenstra’s process in creating this amazing poster. They can also review alternative artworks.

The Milan Machinima Festival MMXXIII takes place between March 19 - 26 2023, online and on site. On March 25 2023, a special screening will take place at the Museum of Interactive Cinema in Milan, Italy.

Tickets are on sale now; seats are limited.

Jordy Veenstra is a video editor, motion graphics designer, 2D animator, and experimental filmmaker based in Amsterdam, the Netherlands. In his practice, Veenstra connects art and narrative with technology and software through the medium of experimental film. His works have been exhibited at the 2020 and 2022 Milan Machinima Festival. His monumental Regression I-III was featured in VRAL S01. His more recent AR3NAE was presented in the ongoing VRAL S03.

Kate Crawford’s Atlas of AI was published by Yale University Press in 2021. The Italian translation, Né intelligente né artificiale. Il lato oscuro dell’IA, was also released 2021 by Il Mulino.

DALL-E and DALL-E 2 are deep learning models developed by OpenAI to generate digital images from natural language descriptions, called "prompts". DALL-E was revealed by OpenAI in a blog post in January 2021, and uses a version of GPT-3 modified to generate images.

Additional information about MMF MMXIII will be shared in the upcoming weeks, so stay tuned.

EVENT: THOMAS HAWRANKE AND LASSE SCHERFFIG (JANUARY 6-19 2023, ONLINE)

COLOSSAL CAVE ADVENTURE – THE MOVIE

Digital video (1024 x 1024), sound, color, 55’ 33” minutes, 2022, Germany  

Created by Thomas Hawranke and Lasse Scherffig

January 6 - 19 2023

Introduced by Matteo Bittanti

vral.org

 

An adaptation sui generis of an early text-based adventure games, Colossal Cave Adventure - The Movie remediates the program developed by Will Crowther in 1976 based on the architecture of the Mammoth Cave complex in Kentucky. The original game used text to describe the environment whereas the animated film uses AI-generated visuals. Every eight seconds, the AI system receives a new textual description, taken from Colossal Cave Adventure’s source code, comprising 379 inputs ranging from narrative descriptions of nature to jargon from the vocabulary of speleologists to single words meaning an object, a compass direction, or an exclamation. The camera constantly moves downwards, digging through geological layers and exposing new cave spaces again and again.

Born in 1977 in Bergisch Gladbach, Germany, Thomas Hawranke is a media artist and researcher whose practice investigates the influence of technology on society and the impact of computational logic onto human-animal-machine relationships. In his eclectic interventions, Hawranke operates at the intersection of performance and video art: a central concern of his is bringing to the surface the ideologies that inform everyday life. Hawranke graduated in Media Art at the Academy of Media Arts Cologne and received a PhD from the Bauhaus-University in Weimar, Germany, with a dissertation on the modification of video games, also known as modding, as a method for artistic research. Since 2005, he has been a member of susigames, an independent art label founded in 2003 that investigates alternative gaming’s approaches, and he is the co-founder of the Paidia Institute in Cologne. His works have been presented at several exhibitions and festivals, including the zkm_gameplay in Karlsruhe and the RENCONTRES INTERNATIONALES PARIS/BERLIN. Hawranke lives and works in Cologne, Germany.

Lasse Scherffig is an artist and scientist with a background in cognitive science/machine learning and computer science. Scherffig is interested in the relationship of humans, machines, and society; cybernetics and the technological infrastructures of communication and control; and the cultures and aesthetics of computation and interaction. His work oscillates between computer science and experimental artistic practices, engineering and amateur/DIY methods, science and humanities. A professor of Interaction Design at Köln International School of Design, he previously served as the Department Chair of Art and Technology at San Francisco Art Institute, where he taught as assistant professor. Scherffig co-founded the artist group Paidia Institute and off topic, magazine for media art. His art projects have been shown at numerous exhibitions. Lasse holds a doctoral degree in Experimental Computer Science from KHM, Academy of Media Arts Cologne.

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EVENT: STEVEN COTTINGHAM (NOVEMBER 18 - DECEMBER 1 2022, ONLINE)

Chain-link

single-channel HD video (1920 x 1080, MPEG-4 AAC, H.264) comprising machinima, 3D animation, and found footage with sound, 90’ 1”, 2022, Canada

Created by Steven Cottingham

WORLD PREMIERE

Bruce Sterling famously stated that the future is “old men, in cities, afraid of the sky”. In Steven Cottingham’s cyberpunk masterpiece filmed with/in an unrecognizable Grand Theft Auto V, Chain-link, the future is even more nightmarish: pervasive surveillance, carceral capitalism, and techno-feudalism.

Steven Cottingham is an artist based in Vancouver. His work concerns the politics of visualization. Recent exhibitions include Natalia Hug Galerie (Cologne, 2022), Artists Space (New York, 2022), The Polygon Gallery (North Vancouver, 2021), and Catriona Jeffries (Vancouver, 2021). From 2018 to 2021, Cottingham co-edited the art theory periodical QOQQOON, and in 2021–2022 he participated in the Whitney Independent Study Program. Chain–link (2022) is his first feature film.

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ARTICLE: A CLOSER LOOK AT BABAK AHTESHAMIPOUR’S POST-CODED THOUGHTS...

Babak Ahteshamipour, Paleontology of Non-existence, installation shot at Sub Rosa space, Athens, Greece, 2021

WHAT COMES AFTER ARMAGEDDON?

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Currently exhibited on VRAL, Babak Ahteshamipour’s Post-coded Thoughts on the Never-Upcoming Foreshadowed Li(f)e's originality reflects the author’s own trajectory, which includes a degree in music theory, harmony and violin studies and a Master of Science in Mineral Resources Engineering. Born in Iran in 1994, Ahteshamipour’s work with video game based video art is relatively recent, although “it boldly shaped [his] identity throughout early life and since cyberspace is part of [his] broader artistic research”, as he told Fantacci. Post-coded Thoughts’s was produced while the world was experiencing the Covid-19 pandemic, with its litany of deaths, lockdowns, and disinformation. Released in 2021, it signaled a shift, or rather a new phase in Ahteshamipour’s practice.

In a sense, the work is an assemblage of motifs, but also artifacts, hereby rendered as virtual objects. Consider for instance the painterly works featured in paleontology of non-existence (2021) an installation that appropriates and recontextualizes characters from various video games and uses tweet-like slogans such as “It seems, after all, we couldn't escape the game engines”. Post-coded was part of this complex scenario in which various planes of reality - the tangible, the simulation, the augmented - engage in a conversation.

Albeit visually playful and imbued with a distinct kind of irony, the world that Paleontology of Non-existence alludes to is a dystopia. An unexplained “event” has abruptly and irreversibly erased all of mankind, so that Earth is now inhabited by AIs. Equally mysterious is the reason behind AI rapid evolution: left to their own devices, machines become sentient, wondering about the disappearance of their former creators. This new algorithmic age is marked by an existential crisis. Machines are trying to find meaning in a world that appears utterly fatalistic. The new normal, just like the old normal, is being stuck in a feedback loop: on the one hand, the simverse is a replica of the pre-existing world. On the other hand, the avatar - a stand-in of the artist himself - is clearly looking for answers that the simulation - just like a market based society - cannot provide. The puppet has become the puppeteer but the wires have not been cut: free will is not an option. Free will can only be simulated. Ditto for artistic creation: the puppet plays music, shifting from his guitar to his piano, stares at his paintings for inspiration, and shares his thoughts and moods.

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Matteo Bittanti

All images courtesy of the artist

Babak Ahteshamipour, Paleontology of Non-existence, installation shot at Sub Rosa space, Athens, Greece, 2021

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EVENT: BABAK AHTESHAMIPOUR (SEPTEMBER 16 - SEPTEMBER 29 2022, ONLINE)

POST-CODED THOUGHTS ON THE NEVER-UPCOMING FORESHADOWED LI(F)E

digital video/machinima (1920 x 1080), color, sound, 8’ 54”, 2021, Iran/Greece

Created by Babak Ahteshamipour

Post-coded Thoughts on the Never-upcoming Foreshadowed Li(f)e is a machinima created with The Sims. In this post-apocalyptic narrative, human beings suddenly vanish, leaving behind all their digital spawns: A.I., avatars, algorithms, and programs. Faced with their own risk of extinction, these non-human entities acquire agency and embark into an existential journey to find meaning in an otherwise empty life. The main character is Babak Ahteshamipour’s alter ego, who is reproducing the sheer banality of RL (real life) activities in an environment mirroring his “real”, concrete space, having imported some of his paintings, few custom 3D models from other video games that are depicted in the paintings, musical improvisations with electric guitar and piano, and a text visualizing the sim-avatar’s thoughts.

Babak Ahteshamipour’s practice is based on the collision of the virtual vs actual, aimed at correlating various topics that are not directly connected at first glance from cyberspace to ecology and politics to identity exploring them via MMORPGs/video games, social media and online integrating themes of co-existence and simultaneity in response to the futuristic anthropocentric urge of technocracy to focus on posthumanism. He has exhibited and performed at Centre Pompidou (Paris, France), New Art City (online), The Wrong (online), Sub Rosa space (Athens, Greece), ERGO Collective (Athens, Greece), arebyte (online), Biquini Wax ESP (Mexico City, Mexico), Experimental Sound Studio (Chicago, Illinois) and elsewhere. He has released music on the independent cassette label Industrial Coast and his music has been played on radio stations such as Noods Radio (Bristol, U.K.), Radio Raheem (Milan, Italy), Fade Radio (Athens, Greece) and Radio alHara. Originally from Iran, Ahteshamipour lives and works in Athens, Greece.

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VIDEO: GINA HARA IN CONVERSATION WITH MARIE LEBLANC FLANAGAN

CONTEXT IS KING

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We are happy to share with our Patreon subscribers — courtesy of Ada X — a video recording of the presentation of AI The End, which Gina Hara produced during her residency in late 2021. The conversation was moderated by Marie LeBlanc Flanagan and took place on Zoom on December 9th, 2021. In the video, Hara provides crucial information about her creative process, the underlying logic of AI and Minecraft, and the development of AI the end, Valley’s precursor. The entire conversation is approximately 45 minute long.

ARTICLE: A CLOSER LOOK AT GINA HARA'S VALLEY

YES, THE FUTURE DOES SOUND LIKE A CHATBOT

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Exclusively featured on VRAL until September 15 2022, Gina Hara’s latest project Valley was originally developed during a three month artist residency at Ada X (October-December 2021) under a different title. Originally founded in 1996 as Studio XX, Ada X (2020-) is a bilingual feminist artist-run center located in Montréal, Canada committed to exploration, creation, and critical reflection in media arts and digital culture. Its main goals are making accessible, demystifying, equipping, questioning, and creating art and culture to contribute to the development of a digital democracy. Ada X hosts residencies, workshops, discussions, exhibitions, performances, and educational activities. Hara’s residency was supported by Algora Lab, an interdisciplinary academic laboratory that fosters a deliberative ethics of AI and digital innovation and analyzes the societal and political aspects of the emerging algorithmic society. Gina Hara is an artist-filmmaker with a background in new media and video art. Her work focuses on marginalized narratives from feminist and immigrant perspectives, specifically in the context of social media and games culture. Entitled AI the End, the original video - which you can watch here - was officially unveiled on Thursday December 9, 2021.

Gina Hara’s ongoing interest in the proliferation of artificial intelligence assistants offering pseudo mental-health help online piqued during the Covid-19 pandemic, which was marked by social isolation and an unprecedented lack of IRL interactions. Specifically, Hara draws a parallel between video game playing and AI-assisted mental health. Such a comparison is remarkable because it provides a possible explanation for the rise of digital gaming as neoliberalism became the world’s dominant ideology: taken to its extreme yet logical consequences, we may suggest that there’s a direct connection between mental disorders and video games. The more psychologically unstable we become due to the conditions of the environments we live in, the more we play Minecraft and the likes. Which is to say: the more unstable, precarious, broken, and unpredictable the World becomes, the stronger the need to exert some kind of control and agency over another kind of world, a simulated world in which we are cast as a powerful demiurge. As the Neoliberalism project succeeded in excising democracy from politics, disenfranchising the masses and replacing it with the so-called “freedom to choose” which pair of sneakers you can buy on Amazon, video games introduced a form of pseudo participation through interactivity. TED Talk “gurus” and Silicon Valley’s “edgelords” call this phenomenon “democratization”, a word that  like “friend”, “community”, “like” has no real meaning outside of the Big Tech bubble, or rather, has purely transactional implications.

(continues)

Matteo Bittanti

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EVENT: GINA HARA (SEPTEMBER 2 - SEPTEMBER 15 2022, ONLINE)

VALLEY

digital video/machinima (1280 x 720), color, sound, 7’ 06”, Hungary/Canada

Created by Gina Hara

Inspired by the rise of artificial intelligence (AI) software in mental health contexts, Gina Hara uses the world of Minecraft as a backdrop for a series of exchanges with an AI-powered chatbot, called Robin, developed specifically for the project. Both the process and the resulting narrative are documented in this short machinima.

Gina Hara is a Hungarian-Canadian filmmaker and artist. She holds an MA in Intermedia, an MFA in Film Production and worked with film, video, new media, gaming, and design. Waning (2011), her first fiction film, was nominated for a Best Canadian Short award at the Toronto International Film Festival. Your Place or Minecraft (2016), a machinima web series focusing on game studies, is currently available on YouTube. Hara’s full length documentary Geek Girls (2017) explores the notion of subculture from women’s perspective and was screened internationally, including IULM University in 2018 during the Gender Play conference. Her artworks have been exhibited by several institutions including the New Museum in New York, the Budapest Kunsthalle and the City of Montreal. Hara lives in Montreal, where she works as Creative Director of the Technoculture, Art and Games Research Centre.

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ARTICLE: NOT INTELLIGENT NOR ARTIFICIAL

As part of our ongoing discussion on Letta Shtohryn’s astute incorporation of The Sims into her artistic practice, we take a look at her first machinima, Algorithmic Oracle (2019), which was screened at the 2020 Milan Machinima Festival.

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Algorithmic Oracle exists as an installation featuring nine single channel videos each lasting 8’ 12” and as a single channel composite of the same duration. Like a time travel narrative, it shows multiple scenarios triggered by a fixed event, that is, a fire. However, the outcomes are determined by an AI rather than by human intervention.

Algorithmic Oracle is a commentary on the ontological capabilities of algorithms: as Eli Pariser argued in 2011, machine-curated news-feeds create insular and homogenous info-contexts, known as filter bubbles. To experience reality in such an environment means to reduce the complexity of reality to a handful of narratives, automatically excluding anything or anyone contradicting the dominant paradigm: the very possibility of an anomaly, that is, an information that does not perfectly for within the current dogma, is eliminated.

Shtohryn argues that algorithms have created a series of parallel realities, a multiverse of experiences, in which clusters of like-minded individuals believe their “world” to be the best of all. Worse yet, these individuals tend to dismiss the very possibility of alternative ways of seeing the world: “I don’t see the same content as you, but we act as if we see the same thing”, she writes in the accompanying text…

Matteo Bittanti

(continues)

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ARTICLE: A PORTRAIT OF THE ARTIST AS A YOUNG ASSEMBLER

What does Felix Klee mean that the screenplay of My paws are soft, my bones are heavy was “written by an artificial intelligence language model”? A few notes about GPT-2 and their implications for machinima.

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Klee used a Generative Pre-trained Transformer 2 (GPT-2) to generate the screenplay of his machinima. (GPT-2) is an open-source artificial intelligence created by OpenAI in February 2019 which can translate text, answer questions, summarize passages, and generate text output on a level that can be almost indistinguishable from human-generated content when used for short texts. One of the most popular applications based on this technology is, incidentally, a video game: AI Dungeon (2019) which used GPT-2 to generate dynamic text adventures based on user input. The screenplay of My paws are soft, my bones are heavy reads as follows:

My paws are soft.

My bones are heavy.

I can smell the sea.

I have an itch.

I can hear the wind.

I’m going to be here for a long time.

So let me take a nap.

My dreams have been full of death.

I’ve seen animals die and be reborn, but

never have I seen a human do the same.

So let me go into the ocean and drown.

It’s cold now.

I wonder if I’ll ever see land again.

The sea is my only home.

My one place where I can feel

myself, my body feels heavy.

My clothes are brutal.

My ears are tired.

I can hear my own heartbeat.

My tail is limp.

I can feel my own blood in my head.

I’m not human.

I'm not a beast.

I’m just another one of my kind.

And so I’ll stay here for as long as

it takes to get through the darkness

until the end of the world of the

world that I know I want to sleep.

I want to sleep.

[continues]

Emissary Forks At Perfection (live simulation, 2015-2016) Created by Ian Cheng, Producer Veronica So, Technical Director Samuel Eng, Modeling & Rigging Joshua Planz, Modeling Breht O'Hearn + Aaron Bohenick, Sound Design Greg Heffernan, Animation Chad Waldschmidt, Graphics Programmer Chris Clapis, Content Designer Jessica Wilson, Technical Artists Yang Wang + Zhenzhen Qi, Story Consultant Sean Manning + Alexander Benaim, Published by Metis Suns.

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EVENT: FELIX KLEE (MAY 13 - MAY 26 2022, ONLINE)

My paws are soft, my bones are heavy

digital video (1920 x 1080), color, sound (stereo), 4’ 57”, Germany, 2021

Created by Felix Klee, 2021

Can an artificial intelligence dream? Apparently, yes. In this oneiric short, it imagines itself as a virtual mountain lion wandering through digital landscapes. After jumping off a cliff, the animal dives into the ocean, looking for some tranquility. Written by an artificial intelligence, narrated by a text-to-speech converter and shot within a modified video game, My paws are soft, my bones are heavy is blatantly post-human.

Felix Klee is studying documentary filmmaking at the University of Television and Film in Munich, Germany. A graduate of the Academy of Fine Arts Munich — where he studied time-based media under Julian Rosefeldt and painting under Pia Fries — Klee previously studied painting under Thomas Hartmann at the Academy of Fine Arts Nuremberg and was a guest student at Universidad de las Artes Aguascalientes México. He co-founded the ReKollektiv, a collective of media artists and directors working towards the democratization of footage and a collectivist approach to film editing. From 2020-2022 he served as an advisory board member at Locarno Film Festival. Klee lives and works in Munich, Germany.

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EVENT: VRAL #25:_LI ZHU (JUNE 11 - JUNE 24 2021)

ALL BEINGS ARE SUFFERING

digital video (1080x 1080), color, 7’ 01”, 2021 (China, Canada)

Created by Li Zhu

June 11 - June 24 2021

Introduced by Matteo Bittanti

All Beings Are Suffering is part of Human Dust, an ongoing project that comprises self-generating scenes of human-like intelligence created by Li Zhu with Unity 3D. These simulated creatures reproduce themselves endlessly, floating in the air and multiplying at a frantic pace. As the artist says, “We don’t know whether such a human-like AI would have consciousness, but their presence will definitely confuse real humans’ consciousness. At least, because I heavily rely on computers to create my artwork, my own consciousness seems to be constantly washed away by algorithms. In a data flood, ‘real’ meanings that may exist in my art quickly decompose. Reality disappears; only a torrent of tumbling image data remains.”

Li Zhu is a Chinese-Canadian artist and scholar who uses new technologies such as video games, virtual reality, artificial intelligence, and social media to create new ways of understanding reality. All Beings Are Suffering is part of an ongoing series titled Human Dust. Li Zhu has an MFA from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago. She received a B.A. in Visual And Intermedia Arts from the University of Quebec in Montreal, Canada. She studied at the École nationale supérieure des beaux-arts de Paris and McGill University. Her work has been exhibited in China, France, Canada, and the United States. Recent exhibitions include I Think (solo, 2017) in Guangzhou, China, ON AURA (group, 2021) in Montreal, and Backyard Stories (group, 2020) in Chicago. She is currently working and living in Chicago.

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