Critics' Choice Award

MMF MMXXIV: CROWD CONTROL IS AWARDED THE CRITICS’ CHOICE AWARD

FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE

Crowd Control Wins the 2024 Milan Machinima Festival Critics Choice Award

Milan, Italy – The Milan Machinima Festival is thrilled to announce that Crowd Control by Jonathan Carroll and Cat Bluemke (SpekWork Studio) has been honored with the 2024 Critics’s Choice Award. This recognition serves not only as a testament to the creativity and skill of Carroll and Bluemke but also highlights the critical role of arts funding — in this case, the Canada Council for the Arts — in nurturing innovative digital explorations.

This groundbreaking Unity 3D project, hereby presented as a game video essay, emerged as a standout in a field of international submissions, captivating jurors and audience alike with its innovative exploration of artificial intelligence and its impact on collective action and historical revolt, particularly within the context of the French Revolutionary mob as depicted in Assassin’s Creed: Unity (2014). This work is part of the duo Assassin’s Creed Art History series, which includes previously self-published game essays Gameworkers and Guildworkers (2020) and Blindspot (2021).

Crowd Control delves into the intersections of crowd simulation technology and the surveillance industry, questioning the role of technology in shaping the possibilities of collective action in both the past and the future. Through its insightful text by Cat Bluemke, compelling design and programming by Jonathan Carroll, and engaging narration by Romanne Walker, the project reflects on the evolution of crowd representations from art history to contemporary video game simulations, redefining the notion of video essay, machinima, and desktop cinema.

The selection of Crowd Control was overseen by an esteemed panel of jurors, including Marco De Mutiis, a digital curator at Fotomuseum Winterthur; Henry Lowood, a curator and scholar at Stanford University; Jenna Ng, a multi-award-winning researcher; and Martin Zeilinger, a senior lecturer in Computational Arts and Technology at Abertay University. Their diverse expertise in digital culture, machinima studies, and the intersection of art and technology played a pivotal role in identifying Crowd Control as a work that embodies the festival’s mission to explore the avant-garde and innovative frontiers of digital storytelling.

The Milan Machinima Festival extends heartfelt congratulations to Jonathan and Cat for their remarkable achievement. The duo presented their work in person on March 14 2024 in the Game Video Essay special program. Crowd Control stands as a compelling examination of how digital and interactive media can not only represent historical and contemporary phenomena but also provoke critical reflection on the destructive force of US-driven techno-capitalism.

For more information about Crowd Control, please visit Spek Studios’ website.

About the Milan Machinima Festival

The Milan Machinima Festival is a leading international event dedicated to exploring the artistic, scholarly, and critical potentials of machinima, a form of filmmaking within real-time, virtual 3D environments. Through its annual presentation of works that challenge traditional narratives and aesthetics, the festival celebrates the innovative convergence of digital gaming, cinema, and video art.

About SpekWork Studio

Cat Bluemke and Jonathan Carroll create art that delves into the themes of work and play, manifesting through video games, performances, and expanded reality experiences. Their collaborative projects, which began in 2013, critically examine how technology mediates both labor and leisure. Operating often under the banners of SpekWork Studio and Tough Guy Mountain, their partnership has produced an intriguing portfolio of work. As SpekWork, they specialize in developing video games, virtual and augmented reality experiences, and mobile applications, intricately exploring the interplay between users, workers, and players. This body of work not only reflects on the technological regulation of daily activities but also invites reflection on the broader implications of digital interaction in modern society.

Work cited

Cat Bluemke, Jonathan Carroll, Crowd Control, digital video, color, sound, 8’ 08”, 2023, Canada.

Narration by Romanne Walker.

Contact: To contact the curators, please click here.

MMF MMXXIII UPDATE: STANISLAW PETRUK'S THE REMNANTS WINS CRITICS' CHOICE AWARD

We are excited to announce that Stanislaw Petruk’s post-apocalyptic tale The Remnants won the Critics’ Choice Award at the Milan Machinima Festival MMXXIII

This year’s jurors, Simonetta Fadda, Stefano Locati, Jenna NG, Marco de Mutiis, and Henry Lowood, gave Stanislaw Petruk’s The Remnants the highest score of all the submitted works, just below Nicolas Gebbe’s The Sunset Special, which was not considered for the award as it exceeded the 10' limit.

Petruk’s work captured the zeitgeist as the world is quickly approaching environmental, social, and geopolitical collapse. In a sense, the jurors felt that this short story prefigures the most likely outcome of the planet’s fate considering the criminal negligence of our political leaders and the indifference of the masses to the challenges that we face today.

Petruk’s video, entirely created with the Unreal Engine, is set five years after a global disaster, where the remaining population is struggling to survive as the planet is dying. This intense machinima portrays the struggle for survival and the harsh reality of human nature in a post-apocalyptic world.

The Remnants was screened yesterday at the Museum of Interactive Cinema as part of the Utopia/Dystopia program and is now available on this very page.

Born in 1987, Stanisław Petruk is a filmmaker and Sr. VFX artist at Avalanche Studios in Sweden. He has directed several shorts and worked on video games such as WWE Immortals, Mortal Kombat, Agents of Mayhem, The Walking Dead, and Saints Row. He lives and works in Stockholm. Petruk is now working on his new project, The Goo.

Matteo Bittanti

Read an interview with Petruk here

NEWS: GINA HARA'S SIDINGS OF THE AFTERNOON WINS THE 2021 CRITICS' CHOICE AWARD

Gina Hara

Gina Hara

Gina Hara’s experimental short shot entirely in Minecraft, Sidings of the Afternoon won the 2021 Critics Choice Award 2021. The jurors were impressed by this short video inspired by Maya Deren’s Meshes of the Afternoon (1943), light works by Lászlo Moholy-Nagy, and Bauhaus urban design. Henry Lowood praised Hara’s work for demonstrating how the trajectory of art traverses all media, from film-making to video games. Featured in the Glitch ‘n scapes program curated by Luca Miranda, Sidings of the Afternoon illustrates the artistic legacy and influence of the Bauhaus on our everyday lives and imagination.

As Gina Hara wrote,

Follow my train of thought, my shifting perception of the space around me, my fleeting relationships with nature and my urban cell. Seasons passing by while I stare at the same three objects in my house. What is outside, what will we find when we emerge? How will we move on when our toxic relationship with a virus that paralyzed our urban bodies end? Scathed or unscathed? Dreams, algae, shadows, flowers and knives.

What can a filmmaker do when they are locked in during a pandemic? They make a film using a computer. With the participation of game scholars and academics from the Technoculture, Art and Games Research Centre, a town was built in Minecraft following the principles of Bauhaus. Just like the designers and artists of Bauhaus, we also need to rethink the way we use spaces, objects, cities. Beyond thinking about medical safety, as humans we need spaces that expand beyond our bodies’ physical circumference. Just like the light-shadow structures built by Moholy-Nagy, our inner worlds are bigger than the space our bodies take up. In Siding of the Afternoon, optimism for our future takes shape in a metaphor of see-through spaces and overlays, echoing the way our apartments expanded through videoconference windows connecting to and merging with other spaces all cross the world.

Gina Hara is a Canadian-Hungarian 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 an event entitled Gender Play. 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.

Il cortometraggio sperimentale di Gina Hara girato interamente in Minecraft, Sidings of the Afternoon si è aggiudicato il Critics Choice Award 2021. I giurati sono rimasti molto colpiti da questo breve video ispirato a Maglie del pomeriggio (1943) di Maya Deren, i giochi di luce di Lászlo Moholy-Nagy e la progettazione urbana del Bauhaus. In particolare, lo storico del machinima Henry Lowood ha elogiato il lavoro di Hara per aver sottolineato poeticamente come la traiettoria dell’arte attraversa tutti i media, dal cinema ai videogiochi. Presentato nel programma Glitch ‘n scapes curato da Luca Miranda, Sidings of the Afternoon celebral’eredità artistica e l’influenza del Bauhaus sulla nostra vita quotidiana e sulla nostra immaginazione.

Come ha scritto Gina Hara,

Segui la mia linea di pensiero, la mia percezione mutevole dello spazio intorno a me, i miei rapporti fugaci con la natura e la mia cellula urbana. Stagioni che passano mentre fisso gli stessi tre oggetti in casa mia. Cosa c'è fuori, cosa troveremo quando emergeremo? Come andremo avanti quando finirà la nostra relazione tossica con un virus che ha paralizzato i nostri corpi urbani? Feriti o illesi? Sogni, alghe, ombre, fiori e coltelli.

Cosa può fare un regista bloccato durante una pandemia? Girare un film usando un computer. Con la partecipazione di studiosi di giochi e accademici del Technoculture, Art and Games Research Center, all’interno di Minecraft abbiamo costruito una città seguendo i principi del Bauhaus. Proprio come i designer e gli artisti del Bauhaus, anche noi dobbiamo ripensare il modo in cui utilizziamo gli spazi, gli oggetti, le città. Oltre a pensare alla sicurezza ​sanitaria, in quanto esseri umani abbiamo bisogno di spazi che si espandano oltre la circonferenza fisica del nostro corpo. Proprio come le strutture luce-ombra costruite da Moholy-Nagy, i nostri mondi interiori sono più grandi dello spazio occupato dai nostri corpi. In Siding of the Afternoon, l'ottimismo per il nostro futuro prende forma in una metafora di spazi trasparenti e sovrapposizioni, riecheggiando il modo in cui i nostri appartamenti si sono espansi attraverso finestre di videoconferenza che si collegavano e si fondevano con altri spazi di tutto il mondo.

Regista e artista canadese-ungherese, Gina Hara ha conseguito un Master of Arts in Intermedia e un Master in produzione cinematografica, per poi cimentarsi con il cinema, il video, i new media, i videogiochi e il design. La sua prima opera fiction, Waning (2011) ha ricevuto una candidatura come miglior cortometraggio al Toronto International Film Festival. Il suo successivo progetto, Your Place or Minecraft (2016) è una docu-serie machinima disponibile su YouTube. Il documentario Geek Girls (2017) esplora la cultura geek femminile ed è stato proiettato a festival internazionali e nel 2018 è stato presentato a Gender Play, un evento organizzato dall’Università IULM di Milano. Le opere di Hara sono state esibite al New Museum di New York, alla Kunsthalle di Budapest e presso istituzione artistiche di Montreal. Hara risiede a Montreal, in Canada dove dirige il Technoculture, Art and Games Research Centre.