January 20, 2022

COLL.EO

EVENT: DIGITAL VIDEO WALL @ METRONOM (MULTIPLE DATES, MODENA, ITALY)

January 20, 2022

COLL.EO

FILTRO @ METRONOM

via Carteria 10

41121 Modena Italy

Multiple dates

Curated by Gemma Fantacci

The theme of METRONOM’s digital art wall for 2022 is FILTRO (Filter). The series, curated by Gemma Fantacci, features a series of artworks situated between gaming, digital art, and video art. The series debuted with Georgie Roxby Smith’s Ain't Free continues with Carson Lynn’s Storm and Stress (2020) until February 14.

Metronom is an art gallery and publishing house based in Modena. Metronom is committed to researching and promoting projects related to contemporary visual culture through personal and collective exhibitions of Italian and international artists. The attention to the creative practices of the younger generations finds a dedicated place in the video wall, where contents related to digital experimentation are presented through an active 24h screen, positioned in the gallery window. Metronom promotes national and international initiatives, in collaboration with public and private institutions, also organized off-site. Alongside the exhibition program, Metronom is dedicated to theoretical research and critical debate, through the Critical Generation project: an annual conference where selected speakers debate the art of the present and a bilingual online magazine, with interviews, insights, critical essays, reviews and news. Metronom launched the editorial project Metronom Books, dedicated to artist books and limited editions created with the direct involvement of the authors.

Click here to read more.

©Carson Lynn, Storm and Stress, courtesy the artist, 2020_1.jpeg

©Carson Lynn, Storm and Stress, courtesy the artist, 2020_2.jpeg

©Carson Lynn, Storm and Stress, courtesy the artist, 2020_3.jpeg

©Carson Lynn, Storm and Stress, courtesy the artist, 2020_4.jpeg

FILTRO @ METRONOM

via Carteria 10

41121 Modena Italy

Varie date

Curato da Gemma Fantacci

Il tema del digital wart wall di METRONOM per il 2022 è FILTRO. La serie, curata da Gemma Fantacci, presenta una serie di opere d'arte situate tra videogioco, arte digitale e video arte. La serie ha debuttato con Ain’t Free di Georgie Roxby Smith e continua con Storm and Stress di Carson Lynn (2020) fino al 14 febbraio.

Metronom è una galleria d’arte e casa editrice con sede a Modena. Metronom si impegna a ricercare e promuovere progetti legati alla cultura visiva contemporanea attraverso mostre personali e collettive di artisti italiani e internazionali. L'attenzione alle pratiche creative delle giovani generazioni trova un luogo dedicato nel videowall, in cui contenuti legati alla sperimentazione digitale sono presentati attraverso uno schermo attivo 24h, posizionato nella vetrina della galleria. Metronom promuove iniziative a livello nazionale e internazionale, in collaborazione con istituzioni pubbliche e private, organizzate anche fuori sede. Accanto al programma espositivo, Metronom si dedica alla ricerca teorica e al dibattito critico, attraverso il progetto Generazione Critica: un convegno annuale dove relatori selezionati dibattono sull'arte del presente e una rivista bilingue online, con interviste, approfondimenti, saggi di critica, recensioni e notizie. Metronom ha avviato il progetto editoriale Metronom Books, dedicato ai libri d'artista e alle edizioni limitate realizzate con il coinvolgimento diretto degli autori.

Clicca qui per saperne di più.

April 1, 2021

COLL.EO

EVENT: VRAL #20_CARSON LYNN (APRIL 2 - APRIL 16 2021)

April 1, 2021

COLL.EO

DEAR EIDOLON

digital video, color, sound, 5’ 58”, 2020 (United States)

Created by Carson Lynn

Introduced by Luca Miranda

In a place where players and avatars coexist in apparent harmony, noticing the constraints and constrictions of game environments is not easy. Design choices, storytelling, and even marginal aspects like the physiognomy of a character are imbued with cultural values based on canons, stereotypes, and conventions. Dear Eidolon invites the viewer to become aware of these aspects and to extend the metaphorical frames of game design. Structured as a conversation between the artist and his avatar, this machinima poses many questions but provides few answers. It is the “user” who is tasked to fill the gaps. As Lynn writes, “By blurring the lines between gamespaces, I sought to explore my complex relationship to these virtual environments that serve as sites for both trauma and discovery.” Originally created for the ArtCenter College of Design Graduate Fellowship: Fall 2020 in Pasadena, California, Dear Eidolon was subsequently presented on the ArtCenter Graduate Art website as a virtual exhibition in February 2021

Carson Lynn uses digital content, sublime landscapes, and game environments to create artworks that propose a reinterpretation of photographic conventions and heterocentric game systems through the lens of queer theory. In 2020, he received an MFA and in 2015 a BFA in Photography and Imaging, both from ArtCenter College of Design in Pasadena, California.

WATCH NOW

April 1, 2021

COLL.EO

NEWS: A CLOSER LOOK AT DEAR EIDOLON

April 1, 2021

COLL.EO

Carson Lynn, Dear Eidolon, 2021 — Carson Lynn, *Dear Eidolon*, 2021

Dear Eidolon, the latest work by Carson Lynn, is screened on VRAL from from April 2 until April 16 on VRAL. An artist based in Ventura, California, Lynn uses digital materials, sublime landscapes, and exploration within gamespaces to create artworks as a queering of heterocentric photographic conventions and game systems. Throughout his work, Lynn questions the power relations that exist within and between images, the presence and absence of the corporeal, and the nature of the digital environment, with its biases and embedded ideologies.

This attention to the very nature of video game spaces and their representative codes can be already discerned in Walking Simulator (2016). Although this work investigates the logic informing the navigable environment, in Oddball (2019) – which was screened at the Milan Machinima Festival in 2020 – Lynn considers the avatar, wondering about its potential but also its many constraints. These concerns also drive Dear Eidolon, which is described as “a space of queer fluidity,” that “defies labels and conventions.” Lynn is reflecting on the liberating potential of ludic indeterminacies. Settings, actions, characters, even the blueprints of video games are enveloped in cultural fences, gender labels, and heterocentric boundaries. Here, however, changing one’s skin is a simpler process than in the lived life. “The first step of freeing oneself from the limits of heteronormativity is often a simple change of clothing.”

Carson Lynn, Walking Simulator, 2016 — Carson Lynn, *Walking Simulator*, 2016

In Lynn’s practice, the “change of clothing” should not be interpreted in strictly literal terms. Rather, it concerns the relationship between the user and the avatar, the spaces traversed and the experience of such spaces. Dear Eidolon addresses both permadeath and permalife in both pragmatic and philosophical terms. These two notions are related to the life and death of characters and to the depletion of resources. A character’s death is usually followed by the “game over”. However, the Dark Souls series and Bloodborne – both featured in Dear Eidolon – popularized the concept of permadeath, a game mechanic whereby a character’s failure leads to an irreparable and definite loss of all the resources that the player collected throughout the game experience. But this is much closer to a literal concept of permalife: a mechanism that forces the character to turn into an infinitely consumable puppet, always already subjected to return to life, condemned to repeat the same mistakes and suffer even more. Dear Eidolon examines this conundrum, introducing new relational possibilities with the characters, the worlds, and the game mechanics.

Carson Lynn, Oddball, 2019 — Carson Lynn, *Oddball*, 2019

The Eidolon – the image, the representation, the phantom – is an entity changing with the change of desires. This transformation can be triggered by the visitors of the virtual worlds, by the players, through minor or significant actions that may subvert the codified, usually not negotiable norms. As Lynn says, “the world and environment surrounding the avatar is just as important as the avatars themselves.” And that is perhaps what we need: to trace a harmony between the elements that make up our digital experiences.

Luca Miranda

WATCH NOW

March 4, 2020

COLL.EO

NEWS: THE WEIRD, THE EERIE, THE UNREAL (MARCH 13 2020)

March 4, 2020

COLL.EO

Machinima is weird, eerie, and unreal. The final program of the 2020 MILAN MACHINIMA FESTIVAL features a series of movies that manifest “a particular kind of perturbation”, symptoms that something “does not belong”, “a sense of wrongness” and “a signal that the concepts and frameworks which we have previously employed are now obsolete”. It also features “landscapes partially emptied of the human”, “failures of absence, failures of presence,” “a sense of alterity”. Finally, it features things “so strange as to appear imaginary; not seeming real”. In other words, machinima is weird, eerie, and unreal. You have been warned,

Il machinima è strano, inquietante e irreale. La selezione conclusiva del MILAN MACHINIMA FESTIVAL 2020 propone cortometraggi che manifestano "un particolare tipo di perturbazione", sintomi che qualcosa "non appartiene", "un senso che le cose non tornano", "un segnale che i concetti e le strutture che abbiamo utilizzato in precedenza sono ormai obsoleti". Presenta anche "paesaggi parzialmente svuotati dell'umano", "fallimenti di assenza, fallimenti di presenza", "un senso di alterità". Infine, illustra cose "così strane da sembrare immaginarie, non reali". IOn altre parole, il machinima è strano, inquietante e irreale. Siete stati avvisati.