Minecraft

MMF MMXXIV: GINA HARA

The Milan Machinima Festival is excited to unveil Gina Hara’s latest project Machinima Bodies Space Rhythm, as part of our Game Video Essay program. We warmly invite you to an exclusive screening event on March 14, 2024, hosted at IULM University. This presents a rare chance to experience Hara’s groundbreaking work firsthand, with the added privilege of an introduction by the artist herself.

Gina Hara’s Machinima Bodies Space Rhythm is a pioneering episodic series that delves into the realm of machinima filmmaking from the perspectives of women and non-binary creators. This project aims to showcase their distinct voices within the machinima sphere. Situated at the intersection of video games, cinema, and digital art, the series illuminates machinima’s unique, hybrid nature. Hara not only highlights machinima’s artistic potential but also prompts reflection on digital identities and the medium’s role in contemporary art. World premiere.

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.

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

MMF MMXXIV: YEWEN LIU

The Milan Machinima Festival is excited to unveil a new machinima by Yewen Liu in a special program titled Game Video Essay. Join us for an exclusive screening on March 14 2024.

The Bialowieża Primeval Forest stands as a remarkable testament to the enduring majesty of temperate Europe’s natural landscapes, hosting an array of distinct ecological communities that have largely remained untouched. Commencing in the 1920s, the forest’s exploitation for economic purposes marked the beginning of significant changes to its pristine condition. In the aftermath of World War II, a mere 600 square kilometers of the original 1,500 square kilometers remained within Polish borders, with the remainder extending into Belarus. Presently, this forest confronts numerous challenges, including deforestation, ecological migratory shifts, displacement of local populations, and a noticeable decline in wildlife populations. In a novel initiative by Greenpeace Poland in 2018, GeoBoxers, a Danish company founded by Simon Lyngby Kokkendorff, Thorbjørn Nielsen and Nynne Sole Dalå,embarked on a project to digitally recreate Bialowieża within the virtual world of Minecraft. This endeavor aimed at virtual reforestation serves as a poignant symbol of hope and awareness, juxtaposed against the backdrop of the forest’s ongoing real-world struggles against irreversible environmental changes. The artist documented such an effort through the medium of machinima. World premiere.  

Yewen Liu, born in 1995, in China is a media artist whose work spans video art, digital installations, and computer games. With a keen focus on interrogating the role of digital media in contemporary storytelling, Liu reinterprets collective memories through her innovative artistic lens. Her exploration extends to themes such as gamification, geopolitics, and the broad societal and environmental implications of digitalization. Liu’s art is a conduit for sparking insightful contemplation on digital culture and its influence on our shared narrative. Through her diverse body of work, she invites audiences to engage with and reflect upon the intricate ways digital technologies, including games, shape and redefine our perceptions of the world.

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



MMF MMXXIV: GINA HARA, RESIDENT ARTIST

The Milan Machinima Festival is proud to welcome acclaimed filmmaker Gina Hara as our inaugural Artist-in-Residence.

During her upcoming festival residency in Milan, Ms. Hara will present her latest work, partecipate in the upcoming In-Game Photography conference, while also leading a 1-day workshop for students enrolled in IULM’s Master of Arts in Television, Cinema and New Media, and specifically in the course taught by Matteo Bittanti entitled Video Games, Technology and Art.

Ms. Hara’s current projects build upon her extensive background in the context of game design, digital community and experimental cinema. As Creative Director of Montreal’s Technoculture, Art and Games Research Centre, she spearheads initiatives melding artistic imagination with videogame technology.

As an interdisciplinary artist, Ms. Hara holds an MA in Intermedia and an MFA in Film Production. Her broad experience encompasses film, video, gaming, new media and design. Her 2011 fiction short Waning received a Best Canadian Short nomination at the Toronto International Film Festival. Over the past decade, Ms. Hara has pioneered new frontiers in both filmmaking and creative Minecraft game video productions.

A true visionary in machinima filmmaking, Ms. Hara is the 2022 recipient of the prestigious Critics’ Choice Award for her stunning Sidings of the Afternoon. Unfolding entirely within Minecraft’s blocky realms, the work weaves an artistic dialogue across digital and physical realms, drawing inspiration from the photography and film innovations of legendary Bauhaus figure László Moholy-Nagy. Specifically, Hara explores how the Bauhaus movement’s ideals, creative techniques and uniting of fine art with function still reverberate through contemporary imagination and virtual spaces today. The film’s nonlinear narrative emerges through the lens of Maya Deren’s avant-garde classic Meshes of the Afternoon.

 
 

Her groundbreaking work Valley (2023) was featured in Season 3 of the VRAL. Inspired by the growing prevalence of AI counseling services, Hara developed a custom chatbot named Robin to simulate conversations spanning emotional issues like anxiety, self-doubt and growth. The dialogues touch on quintessentially human questions of purpose, connection and inner peace. Setting these intimate debates within a fantastical blocky gaming realm adds layers of irony and underscores the gulf between AI logical thinking and nuances of human psychology.

 
 

Her earlier film Geek Girls (2017) was screened at IULM in 2019 as part of the university’s Gender Play series events exploring the role of women in gaming culture. This original documentary reveals the overlooked women within fan communities. In fact, although geeky pop culture has gained prominence and visibility, little attention has focused on the many women shaping these worlds.With insight and humor, Hara’s camera follows female gamers, coders and sci-fi fans. She captured their exhilaration and solidarity, but also their frequent exclusion within male-dominated nerd spheres. From professional gamers facing online harassment to women developers battling death threats, Geek Girls spotlights a complex multiplicity of female experiences. Some women find community, some encounter gatekeeping. Most see both. Through intimate interviews, the film unpacks women’s engagement with today’s geek culture. Hara grapples with her own geeky identity on camera, situating herself within the world explored.

 
 

No less remarkable is Hara’s 2015 immersive multimedia installation that transforms the popular game Minecraft into a thought-provoking experiment on the rise and fall of civilizations, MindCraft, created with Pierson Browne and Joachim Desplande.

In its original open-world form, Minecraft offers players endless freedom to create, destroy, and explore fantasy realms limited only by their imagination. Yet in Hara, Browne and Desplande’s hacked version of the game, players face a starkly different scenario. Instead of an infinite sandbox, participants find themselves confined to a small, isolated island in the sky, surrounded on all sides by a vast, empty void. With minimal living space and finite resources, players must band together to survive and build a lasting society on this isolated island, passing hard-won knowledge from one generation to the next. Each person’s gameplay decisions collectively determines whether this microcosm world thrives or perishes over time.

By subverting Minecraft’s utopian promise, MindCraft confronts participants with important questions on sustainability, cooperation, and the delicate balance between creation and destruction. As they build an uncertain future for those who come next, players may gain insight into the enduring question: What legacy do we choose to leave?

 
 

In 2016, Hara directed and produced the award-winning machinima documentary web series Your Place or Minecraft? exploring the intersection of gaming and academia.

This episodic show transports viewers to the richly modded virtual realm known as the “mLab server” on Minecraft, owned by a game research center at Montreal’s Concordia University and inhabited by real-life students and professors from the center itself. As their academic lives and virtual adventures intertwine, the series captures the compelling stories that emerge. The seven episodes follow the players as they navigate collaborative projects, interpersonal conflicts, ambition, joy and frustrations, all within Minecraft’s possibility space.

Part documentary and part social drama, Your Place or Minecraft offers a window into the bonding and clashes that arise when academics build together in a virtual sandbox. The show spotlights not only their creations but also their real-world relationships as revived through the lens of gameplay. With insightful humor and immersive filming, the webseries encapsulates the joys, politics and collaborative challenges of scholarship.

 
 

We eagerly anticipate the insights and inspiration Ms. Hara will contribute as our first Game Artist-in-Residence at the 2024 Milan Machinima Festival.

Read more about Gina Hara’s work

EVENT: CHRIS KERICH (OCTOBER 27 - NOVEMBER 9 2023, ONLINE)

Three Impossible Worlds

digital video, color, sound, 2022, 11’ 14”, United States

Created by Chris Kerich

A speculative digital art project that probes the underlying logic and limitations of procedural world generation Three Impossible Worlds was developed with/in the popular video game Minecraft. The artist began by conceptualizing a series of thought experiments: worlds deemed “impossible” within Minecraft’s existing generative framework. By subverting the game’s expected parameters, Three Impossible Worlds surfaces latent politics and ingrained assumptions coded into procedural systems. 

Chris Kerich is a programmer and artist living and working in Lethbridge, Alberta. Kerich is interested in systems, constrained art, information, critical science studies, and video games. Chris is currently an Assistant Professor at the University of Lethbridge. He received his doctorate from the program in Film and Digital Media Studies at the University of California, Santa Cruz, and he has received a Master of Arts from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) in 2017 and a Bachelor of Science from Carnegie Mellon University in 2013. Kerich’s creative endeavors have garnered international recognition and have been featured in retrospectives and events like the Milan Machinima Festival (2021, 2019, Milan, Italy) and Vector Festival (2018, Toronto, Canada).

VIDEO: GINA HARA'S YOUR PLACE OR MINECRAFT? (2016)

A TERRIFIC ONLINE ETHNOGRAPHY

Patreon-Exclusive content

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Patreon-Exclusive content 〰️

We're happy to share with our Patreon subscribers Your Place or Minecraft?, directed by Gina Hara in 2016. A precursor to Hara's more experimental work with Mojan Studios' world-building game (think Sidings of the Afternoon or Valley), Your Place or Minecraft? documents the activities of a handful of Canadian academics playing together. The full series, which debuted on YouTube six years ago to great critical acclaim, comprises eight episodes.

Both entertaining and revealing, Your Place or Minecraft?, takes place in the virtual land of the mLab server, one of the most modded Minecraft servers in the world. But what makes it really special is that it is owned by academic game research centres of Concordia University where the players - students and professors - all work together in real life. Their IRL friendships, objectives and conflicts result in fascinating, self-reflexive and sometimes explosive gameplay. Hara's modus operandi, connecting gaming, research, and film making, is a testament to the ethnographic potential of documentary-based machinima

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Matteo Bittanti

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