Brody Condon

ARTICLE: NEITHER ARCHAIC, ARCANE, NOR ANACHRONISTIC: THE MULTIFACETED REMEDIATIONS OF HUI WAI-KEUNG’S RE-DÜRER

Hui Wai-Keung, Re-Dürer, three channel video installation, generated graphics from video game hacking, 2016, Hong Kong

VRAL is currently showcasing Parallel V by Hui Wai-Keung, a work that serves both as sequel and homage to Harun Farocki’s Parallel I-IV series (2012-2014). To provide a comprehensive context for this piece, we delve into the artist’s oeuvre, expanding our critical examination with the monumental project Re-Dürer (2016), which was originally presented in the context of the exhibition GAME VIDEO/ART. A SURVEY.

Albrecht Dürer’s iconic early 16th century engravings Knight, Death and the Devil, Melencolia I and Saint Jerome in His Study deftly capture the melancholy temperament then informing the Northern Renaissance zeitgeist. Each work brims with allegorical symbols and objects freighted with shifting meaning across spiritual, philosophical and creative domains. In Knight, Death and the Devil, a stoic rider perseveres past Death and the Devil, communicating fortitude and moral resolve. Melencolia I portrays a winged angel seated pensively amidst tools of science and art, surrounded by mystical geometries hinting at creative aporia. Saint Jerome in His Study shows the scholarly saint reading in a meticulously detailed monastic cell, worldly threats held at bay.

Half a millennium later, the Hong Kong-based interdisciplinary artist Hui Wai-Keung radically reinterpreted this trilogy through the digital medium of video games in his 2016 video installation Re-Dürer. Hui hacked Rockstar Games’s Grand Theft Auto V (2013), disrupting graphics, mechanics and physics to stage complex tableaux which reconfigure themes of morality, creativity, faith, and knowledge within Dürer’s works and adding new layers of meaning, courtesy of Joseph Beuys. Displayed across three channels, Hui’s “reworks” – as he terms them – add a patina of irony and existential absurdity by transposing early modern symbology into the chaotic contemporary milieu of Los Santos, GTA V’s deranged, hyper-realistic urban sandbox.

The jarring juxtaposition of Renaissance sensibility with nihilistic virtuality in Re-Dürer generates cognitive dissonance in the viewer, short-circuiting inherited cultural schema. Are utopian aspirations still viable in worlds increasingly coded and commodified? What becomes of contemplation in spaces defined by endless aggression and appropriation no longer even recognized as such? Hui implies that the 21st century experience offers little safety from the persistent existential threats embodied by Death and the Devil in Dürer’s era. Perhaps only…

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Matteo Bittanti

Works cited

Hui Wai-Keung, Re-Dürer, three channel video installation, featuring generated graphics from hacking/modding Grand Theft Auto V, 2016.

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ARTICLE: DANCING WITH MYSELF: HUI WAI-KEUNG WOULD RATHER NOT PLAY

Hui Wai-Keung, No Play Today, In-game performance in Anarchy Online, 2005 (still)

VRAL is currently showcasing Parallel V by Hui Wai-Keung, a work that serves both as a sequel and an homage to Harun Farocki’s Parallel I-IV series (2012-2014). To provide a comprehensive context for this piece, we delve into the artist's oeuvre, beginning our critical examination with No Play Today (2005).

In October 2005, artist Hui Wai-Keung staged a subversive intervention within the sprawling virtual world of the massively multiplayer online role-playing game (MMORPG) Anarchy Online (2001). For days, his avatar Alenila defiantly danced amidst the chaos of the Temple of the Three Winds, a notoriously fierce battlefield where players typically hack and slash to progress, not pirouette. This apparent non sequitur – out-of-place dancing rupturing a space reserved for programmed violence and brutal conquest – forms the basis of Hui’s provocation titled No Play Today. At once absurd, futile and profound, his choice to inject poetic play into pre scripted gameplay remains significant on multiple levels.

First and foremost, No Play Today complicates the relationship between play and modern video game environments. As Hui elucidates, the expected form of “play” in spaces like MMORPGs largely replicates hegemonic power structures, privileging might and domination. Players internalize capitalist mandates valorizing ceaseless competition, individualism, and instrumental exploitation. Those flouting these agendas face quizzical, even hostile resistance from game communities invested in established hierarchies. Why dance when one could (should) fight? Any such spontaneous expressions violating this ingrained social code threaten the status quo.

Yet Hui’s intervention also suggests emancipatory potential still dormant and underdeveloped in these virtual play spaces. His dancing avatar becomes a zany performance event, generating liminal spaces where the assumptions are actively sabotaged. Relying on sheer spectacle to disarm players and reject genre conventions, Hui replaces individualism with a communal, aesthetic experience. A fellow player even spontaneously joins in this triumphant deviance, discovering alternative relations founded on wonder rather than antagonism. However brief before reprisals resume the rupture hints that regimes of separation are not total. Unscripted connections remain possible. One is reminded of Joseph Delappe’s dead-in-iraq (2006-), in which the emergent gameplay (writing the names of the fallen American soldiers in a video game chat as an anti-violence statement) is quickly squashed by annoyed players.

Apropos DeLappe we can situate No Play Today in a trajectory of related performative interrogations of gaming space. Notably, the seminal 2002 project Velvet-Strike provides a resonant precedent of artistic intervention disrupting the dominant gameplay. The eponymous downloadable software package by Anne-Marie Schleiner, Joan Leandre and Brody Condon enabled participants to “spray” pacifist messages and images as graffiti amidst standard death match fury in Counter-Strike. This act of disseminating rainbows or daisies rather than employing firearms to annihilate other players, sardonically questioned the erasure of empathy encouraged by first-person shooters.

No Play Today continues this tradition of employing jarring aesthetic dissonance to…

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Matteo Bittanti

Works cited

Hui Wai-Keung, No Play Today, in-game performance in Anarchy Online, 2005 hereby shown as a machinima documentation, color/sound, 5’ 37”, 2005.

Hui Wai-Keung, Parallel V, digital video, single-channel-projection, color, sound, 26’ 14”, 2023.

Pippin Barr, Let’s Play: Ancient Greek Punishment, video game, 2011.

Anne-Marie Schleiner, Joan Leandre and Brody Condon, Velvet Strike, modification of Counter-Strike, 2002. (recommended: Rhizome's critical text about this work)

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ARTICLE: ...OK, BUT JUST HOW POWERFUL IS YOUR LOVE?

Following our recent exploration of Merlin Dutertre’s Lullaby (2019) – which is now accessible here after its VRAL show – we turn our focus to the works that have shaped his artistic vision. After examining Jon Rafman’s groundbreaking A Man Digging (2013), we now shift our lens to Jonathan Vinel’s avant-garde machinima, Notre amour est assez puissant (Our Love is Powerful Enough, 2014).

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“In video games, you get to look at the environment in a way that you don’t in real life, because it’s beautiful and magical. But this leap into the game also allows you to live and experience things differently. In the end, it’s about reconnecting better through disconnecting.” (Caroline Poggi)

In an insightful interview, Dutertre attributes his formative years in the 2010s to YouTube, which he considers pivotal in shaping his identity as a filmmaker. Back then, Dutertre engaged enthusiastically with gaming-related content on the video sharing platform, although the concept of machinima initially eluded him. His high school years marked a turning point, ignited by the early works of Jon Rafman and Jonathan Vinel.

In this short essay, I will discuss Vinel’s machinima and then broaden the context to provide a clearer picture (no pun intended).

Born in 1988 in Toulouse, Jonathan Vinel studied editing at the esteemed film school La Fémis in Paris where he cultivated his passion for games, cinema, and pop culture. He later met Caroline Poggi, a Corsican native born in 1990. Poggi studied at Paris IV University and at the University in Corsica. The two crossed paths in college and directed several short films separately – including Poggi’s Chiens, and Vinel’s Notre amour est assez puissant. Their subsequent collaborative filmmaking practice comprises award-winning shorts, including the Golden Bear-winning Tant qu’il nous reste des fusils à pompe (As Long As Shotguns Remain) and Martin Pleure (Martin Cries, 2017), and full feature films, including Jessica Forever (2018), a paradigmatic example of what has been labeled the GAMECORE genre, which we will address in a separate post.

Vinel’s nine-minute machinima offers a complex interplay of disparate elements: militaristic imagery from first-person shooter games, romantic idealism, and metaphysical purity symbolized by a computer-generated tiger evocative of Thai filmmaker Apichatpong Weerasethakul’s surreal narratives.

Let’s unpack these three themes.

Firstly, Notre amour est assez puissant draws heavily from the visual and thematic elements found in first-person shooter games such as DOOM (id Software, 1993). These games are characterized by their aggressive, fast-paced action, and often hyper-violent scenarios. They usually involve a single protagonist navigating a hostile environment, armed with various weapons, and fighting off enemies in a dog-eat-dog world. The imagery is often dark, gritty, and designed to evoke a sense of urgency and danger. Vinel’s machinima comprises unsettling sequences set initially in a high school and later in a zoo, which evoke the disturbing prevalence of mass shootings in the United States. As for the latter, a group of virtual soldiers spend their evening slaughtering the trapped animals – elephants, monkeys, crocodiles – for “fun” and out of boredom. Both sequences are shocking: the calmness and slow pace which accompanies the narrator’s monotone speech heighten this sense of uneasiness…

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Matteo Bittanti

Works cited

Brody Condon, Adam Killer, in-game performance, color, sound, video game mod, various lenghth, 1999, United States

Jon Rafman, A Man Digging, digital video, color, sound, 8’ 20’’, 2013, Canada

Jonathan Vinel, Notre amour est assez puissant, digital video, color, sound, 9’ 16”, 2014, France

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