Marco De Mutiis

FOTOLUDICA: OVER 500 ATTENDEES AT IULM UNIVERSITY

FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE

Over 500 Attendees at Italy’s First Conference on In-Game Photography

Milan, Italy – IULM University hosted the pioneering Fotoludica conference on March 14 and 15, 2024, marking a significant milestone in the recognition of in-game photography as an emerging art form. Curated by Matteo Bittanti and Marco De Mutiis, the event attracted over 500 participants, highlighting its success and the growing interest in this cutting-edge field.

Fotoludica, brought together a diverse group of attendees, not limited to IULM students. The conference saw participation from students across various universities and art schools, including a notable class from the Milan Academy of Art of Brera, led by esteemed curator Domenico Quaranta.

The event unfolded in the Sala dei 146 at IULM 6, Università IULM, offering two days filled with insightful talks, presentations, and discussions. It served as a vibrant platform for creators, researchers, and theorists to explore the intersections of video games, photography, copyright law, activism, and visual culture.

Fotoludica tackled various facets of in-game photography, from the artistry of photo modes and screenshot hacks to the legalities concerning player-created images. The conference featured analyses of works by renowned artists such as Boris Camaca, Leonardo Magrelli, Simone Santilli, Alan Butler, Pascal Greco, Joseph DeLappe and Adonis Archontides, showcasing the depth and creativity possible within virtual gaming worlds.

Key topics included the use of photography for architectural visualization in games like Minecraft, documenting in-game performance art, and contemporary war photography. Discussions delved into the ways gaming environments, when viewed through a photographic lens, can expose themes of violence, labor exploitation, and colonial ideologies.

The lineup of speakers spanned diverse fields, including art history, visual culture, game development, and internet law, with keynotes by Marco De Mutiis on “Playable Imaging” and a special conversation between artist Joseph DeLappe and scholar Laura Leuzzi. Panel discussions led by Bittanti and De Mutiis critically examined the boundaries of creativity, authorship, and ethics in photographic practices using game engines.

Fotoludica has not only established in-game photography as a significant art form but also underscored IULM University's leading role in the scholarly exploration of photography within game studies. The conference’s success in fostering multidisciplinary dialogue sets a new benchmark for artistic interrogation of games, bridging the worlds of photography and machinima.

Fotoludica was the first of a series of events organized by IULM University on the topic of in-game photography as part of an ongoing research. Additional initiatives will take place in May 2024. For more information on the Fotoludica conference and its contributions to the field, please contact Matteo Bittanti at matteo.bittanti@iulm.it

Contact Information:

Matteo Bittanti

Università IULM

Via Carlo Bo, 2

20143 Milano

Event Information: Fotoludica
Date: March 14-15, 2024
Time: 10 AM - 1 PM
Location: Sala dei 146, IULM 6, Università IULM

MEET THE JURORS: MARCO DE MUTIIS

Marco De Mutiis, courtesy of the Author

The seventh edition of the Milan Machinima Festival features an international jury panel comprising four esteemed members, including Marco De Mutiis.

Marco De Mutiis is a Digital Curator at Fotomuseum Winterthur in Switzerland where he leads the museum research on algorithmic and networked forms of vision and image-making. He leads and co-curates different projects and platforms expanding the role and the space of the museum. These include the collaborative live stream programme Screen Walks (developed and co-curated with Jon Uriarte, curator of digital programmes at The Photographers’ Gallery in London), as well as Fotomuseum’s current experimental platform [permanent beta] The Lure of the Image.

Marco is also the co-director of the groundbreaking Master in Algorithmic and Networked Photography at Elisava in Barcelona, Spain, which will make its debut in September 2024.

He is a researcher and doctoral candidate at the Centre for the Study of the Networked Image at South Bank University where he focuses on the relationship between computer games and photography. He co-curated with Matteo Bittanti the group exhibition How to Win at Photography – Image-making as Play, exploring the photographic act through the act of play and the notion of games.

He has written, edited and contributed to several publications, including the recent book Screen Images – In-Game Photography, Screenshot, Screencast (co-edited with Winfried Gerling and Sebastian Möring). He is part of the artist duo 2girls1comp with Alexandra Pfammatter and his artworks have been shown internationally in galleries and festivals. He lectures and teaches regularly in different institutions and schools, including Master Photography at ECAL and Camera Arts at Lucerne University of Applied Arts and Design.

Read more about Marco De Mutiis’ work here.

NEWS: ANNOUNCING THE MMF MMXXIII INTERNATIONAL JURY PANEL

The MILAN MACHINIMA FESTIVAL is delighted to announce the 2023 jury panel: Simonetta Fadda, Stefano Locati, Jenna Ng, Marco de Mutiis, and Henry Lowood.

Born in Savona, Italy Simonetta Fadda is an artist, educator, essayist and translator. Her teaching activity include the Accademia di Belle Arti "Giacomo Carrara" (Bergamo), Accademia di Belle Arti di Brera (Milan) and Scuola Civica di Cinema e Televisione “Luchino Visconti” (Milan). Since the Eighties, she has been working with video art. Her artworks are featured in public and private collections in Italy and in Europe. She participated in major international events such as Movimenta – Biennale de l’image en mouvement, projet Mondes Flottants: Grandes Images, Nice, France (2017) and Parallel Program of the 13th Istanbul Biennial, Institut Français d’Istanbul, Istanbul (2013). In Italy she was featured, among others, at Festival del Nuovo Cinema di Pesaro, Pesaro – Italy (in We Want Cinema: cinema e video di ricerca 2018, and in Satellite 2016) and Bergamo Film Meeting, Bergamo – Italy (2010). A prolific writer and critic, Fadda is the author of the seminal Definition zero: origins of video art between politics and communication (Costa & Nolan, Milan 1999), the first Italian study on video as a medium of art and political activism (reprinted in an expanded format in 2017 by Meltemi Edizioni, Milan). In 2020, Franco Angeli published her new book, Media and art. Among her editing and translation work into Italian is Gene Youngblood’s Expanded Cinema.

Stefano Locati is a post-doctoral research fellow at IULM University in Milan, Italy. His research focuses on Chinese and Japanese cinemas, transmedia, adaptation studies, periodical studies. He holds a Ph.D. in Literatures and Media and a master’s degree in philosophy. Heis the author of Sistema media mix. Cinema e sottoculture giovanili del Giappone contemporaneo (The Media Mix System. Cinema and Youth Subcultures of Contemporary Japan, 2022), La spada del destino. I samurai nel cinema giapponese dalle origini a oggi (The Sword of Doom. Samurai in Japanese cinema from the origin to the present, 2018), Il nuovo cinema di Hong Kong. Voci e sguardi oltre l’handover (New Hong Kong Cinema. Voices and Sights beyond the Handover, 2014, with Emanuele Sacchi), and Evolution. Darwin e il cinema (Evolution. Darwin and cinema, 2009, with Elena Canadelli). He has co-edited with Dario Boemia the volume Book Reviews and Beyond. Critical Authority, Cultural Industry, and Society in Periodicals Between the 18th and the 21st Century (2021). He is a member of the Scientific Committee of the Ca' Foscari Short Film Festival in Venice and the artistic director of Sognielettrici/Electricdreams International Film Festival in Milan.

Jenna Ng is Senior Lecturer in Film and Interactive Media at the School of Arts and Creative Technologies, University of York. She has published widely on digital media and visual culture, with research interests as well in the philosophy of technology, the posthuman, computational culture and the digital humanities. She is the editor of Understanding Machinima: Essays on Films in Virtual Worlds (Bloomsbury, 2013) and the author of The Post-Screen Through Virtual Reality, Holograms and Light Projections: Where Screen Boundaries Lie (Amsterdam University Press, 2021). Her latest work is a creative multimedia portfolio online piece, “The New Virtuality” (2022).

Marco de Mutiis is Digital Curator at Fotomuseum Winterthur and an artist working with different media and technologies and with an interest in issues of perception and communication. Often re­-engineering and transforming old analog and mechanical devices, De Mutiis creates kinetic installations that concern with communication, language and physicality. Graduated with distinction from the MFA program at the School of Creative Media (City University of Hong Kong), he has shown his works internationally in festivals and galleries. He has been the recipient of the Bloomberg Digital Arts Initiative in 2013. He has worked as a senior research associate and part-time lecturer at City University of Hong Kong and he is pursuing a Doctorate Program.

Henry Lowood is Curator for Germanic Collections and Harold C. Hohbach Curator, History of Science & Technology Collections in the Stanford University Libraries. As a curator, he is part of the Humanities Research Group in Green Library, the Department best known for the Lane Reading Room and a wonderful group of colleagues. Henry Lowood has written several essays on such topics as game studies, game preservation, and machinima. Among his most recent books are The Machinima Reader (2012) with Michael Nitsche and Debugging Game History (2016) with Raiford Guins, both published by MIT Press and Machinima! Teorie, pratiche, dialoghi with Matteo Bittanti in 2013, published by Edizioni Unicopli. Along with Guins, Lowood is now editing a new series for MIT Press about the history and culture of gaming. Since 2000, Lowood has headed a project first funded by the Stanford Humanities Laboratory and, since the demise of SHL, continued in the Libraries. Among other projects, Lowood curated the Machinima Archive for the Internet Archive, which is dedicated to the academic investigation and historical preservation of the emerging art form known as machinima. From 2008 to 2013, Lowood led the HTGG Stanford group in a project first funded by the U.S. Library of Congress called Preserving Virtual Worlds.

NEWS: MEET OUR JURORS: MARCO DE MUTIIS

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WE ARE THRILLED TO ANNOUNCE THE FIFTH JUROR OF THE 2020 MILAN MACHINIMA FESTIVAL: MARCO DE MUTIIS

Marco De Mutiis is Digital Curator at Fotomuseum Winterthur and an artist working with different media and technologies and with an interest in issues of perception and communication. Often re­-engineering and transforming old analog and mechanical devices, De Mutiis creates kinetic installations that concern with communication, language and physicality. Graduated with distinction from the MFA program at the School of Creative Media (City University of Hong Kong), he has shown his works internationally in festivals and galleries. He has been the recipient of the Bloomberg Digital Arts Initiative in 2013. He has worked as a senior research associate and part-time lecturer at City University of Hong Kong and he is pursuing a Doctorate Program.