Owen Davies

NEWS: DA MAN! SCORES!

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VRAL is currently exhibiting Juan Obando’s Pro Revolution Soccer, a modded version of Konami’s popular soccer game celebrating a counter-historical event: a match between Inter Milan and the Zapatista Army of National Liberation soccer team that never took place. Today, we are presenting another example of Game Art made by hijacking, appropriating and recontextualizing Pro Evolution Soccer, Gweni Llwyd and Owen Davies’s Becoming a Legend (2020), which was originally exhibited on VRAL and it is now available on the artists’ website In this article, we revisit Becoming a Legend and we discuss the difference between avant-garde and vernacular machinima through the lens of Rebecca Cannon’s seminal essay, Meltdown (2006). This article is part of an ongoing series.

In a 2020 interview with Luca Miranda, artists Gweni Llwyd and Owen Davies discuss the creation of Becoming a Legend, whose genesis was inspired by their love for football video games and their inspiration from documentaries and other machinima works. The artists explain their use of Pro Evolution Soccer as they felt it was better suited to their original concept. Among other things, they preferred the mechanics of PES’s replay camera and found its visual aesthetic to be more otherworldly compared to the stricter dedication to realism of Konami’s main competitor FIFA, EA Sports’s popular football game. They also mentioned that using an out-of-date version of PES, the 2015 edition, gave the footage a slightly nostalgic feel, which aligned with their artistic vision. Furthermore, the artists appreciated the lack of licensing in PES compared to FIFA. They found it intriguing to have the action take place around fictional teams with strange names, which added a mythical quality to their artwork. This choice allowed them to create a unique atmosphere and contribute to the portrayal of their godlike, menacing but also comic-like figure, Da Man!.

Llwyd and Davies also examine the culture of football and the obsession with physical optimization, which is reflected in their portrayal of the grotesque character Da Man!. They explore the concept of self-optimization and its connection to neoliberalism, highlighting the constant pressure to improve and be productive. The artists suggest that video games, including football games, contribute to this ideology by rewarding player participation with symbolic rewards.

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Matteo Bittanti

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EVENT: VRAL #25:_LI ZHU (JUNE 11 - JUNE 24 2021)

ALL BEINGS ARE SUFFERING

digital video (1080x 1080), color, 7’ 01”, 2021 (China, Canada)

Created by Li Zhu

June 11 - June 24 2021

Introduced by Matteo Bittanti

All Beings Are Suffering is part of Human Dust, an ongoing project that comprises self-generating scenes of human-like intelligence created by Li Zhu with Unity 3D. These simulated creatures reproduce themselves endlessly, floating in the air and multiplying at a frantic pace. As the artist says, “We don’t know whether such a human-like AI would have consciousness, but their presence will definitely confuse real humans’ consciousness. At least, because I heavily rely on computers to create my artwork, my own consciousness seems to be constantly washed away by algorithms. In a data flood, ‘real’ meanings that may exist in my art quickly decompose. Reality disappears; only a torrent of tumbling image data remains.”

Li Zhu is a Chinese-Canadian artist and scholar who uses new technologies such as video games, virtual reality, artificial intelligence, and social media to create new ways of understanding reality. All Beings Are Suffering is part of an ongoing series titled Human Dust. Li Zhu has an MFA from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago. She received a B.A. in Visual And Intermedia Arts from the University of Quebec in Montreal, Canada. She studied at the École nationale supérieure des beaux-arts de Paris and McGill University. Her work has been exhibited in China, France, Canada, and the United States. Recent exhibitions include I Think (solo, 2017) in Guangzhou, China, ON AURA (group, 2021) in Montreal, and Backyard Stories (group, 2020) in Chicago. She is currently working and living in Chicago.

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EVENT: VRAL #24_GWENI LLWYD AND OWEN DAVIES (MAY 28 - JUNE 10 2021)

BECOMING A LEGEND

digital video (1280 x 720), color, sound, 5’ 32’’, 2020 (United Kingdom)

Created by Gweni Llwyd, Owen Davies

The practice of customizing characters and assets in video games has a long tradition within vernacular as well as avant-garde subcultures. In fact, artists have often pursued this route to create their artworks. Few, however, reach the meta playful levels of Becoming a Legend which introduces the imperious character of Da Man!, a post-human, virtual übermensch, a diabolical, green-haired “divin codino”. Created with/in the popular video game Pro Evolution Soccer, Da Man! embodies the notion of toxic masculinity and the neoliberalist mantra of self-optimization. 

Gweni Llwyd (she/her) is a Welsh artist based in Cardiff. Her practice reflects on a human condition caught between tactile physicality and intangible digital realms. Predominantly working in video, 3D animation, and installation, Gweni creates abstracted rhythms and narratives, mirroring the often chaotic, disjointed nature of the contemporary world by collecting, modifying and rearranging the most disparate sources and materials, including first hand and found footage, game engines and concrete artifacts. She is also co-founder of RAT TRAP, a collective of artists and musicians that find their own routes through the maze of protocols and ways of doing things. 

Owen Davies (he/him) is a Welsh filmmaker based in Cardiff. Mainly working in live-action narrative film, his work revolves around the limits of human connection and interaction. Owen’s upcoming short film Arwel’s House, funded by Ffilm Cymru and the BBC, is shooting in July and will air on BBC4 in the UK later this year. The film follows the mother of a dead YouTube star as she gives tours of his childhood home in South Wales to fans from around the world. In 2018, he was shortlisted for the Armani Laboratorio where judge David Kajganich (Suspiria, The Terror) described his script Money Now as “just fantastic — a kind of moral emergency for the modern age that left me both queasy and totally fascinated.”

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