EVENT: SATURDAY MORNING ANIMATION CLUB (JUNE 11, 18, 25 - JULY 2, 9 2022, ONLINE)

SATURDAY MORNING ANIMATION CLUB

Curated by Petra Széman in partnership with isthisit? and Off Site Project

Supported by Arts Council England

Saturday June 11, 18, 25 2022

Saturday July 2, 9 2022

online (registration required, see below for details and links)

Saturday Morning Animation Club is a terrific screening/talk series taking place over five consecutive Saturday mornings, featuring new works by Emily Mulenga, Petra Szemán, David Blandy, Christian Wright, and Bob Bicknell-Knight. Each screening will be followed by a second presentation featuring a commentary by the artist, and will conclude with a Q&A session. The curators’ goal is “to re-capture the excitement of watching cartoons over the weekend and celebrate all forms of fandom”.

Full details

Saturday Morning Animation Club is a series of screenings + talks across five weeks between 11 June - 9 July, showcasing films by people who wield the dual powers of being an artist and a nerd.

Unified by an early fascination and involvement with anime and games, each artist focuses in on the worlds and perspectives fandom allows for. From this angle the five videos broaden ideas of human and non-human perception, screen-based experiences, virtual worlds and alternative ways of being.

Join us on Saturday mornings for a screening of new video commissions by Emily Mulenga, Petra Szemán, David Blandy, Christian Wright and Bob Bicknell-Knight respectively, followed by a little insider walkthrough and a Q&A (via Zoom).

Tied together by a refusal to downplay the enthusiasms and generative energy of fandom, Saturday Morning Animation Club will lead viewers through iterations of animatic worlds, on- and off-screen, with or without player input. The screening series has been produced in collaboration with web projects isthisit? and Off Site Project. Attendance of all five screenings will be rewarded with a special prize.

The videos were commissioned using funding from Arts Council England as part of On Animatics, a cross-disciplinary project exploring the murky overlapping areas of contemporary art, animation, fandom, avatars and virtual worlds.To conclude the project, the book WEEB THEORY will be released later this year with Banner Repeater, edited by Petra Szemán and Jamie Sutcliffe.

Featured artwoks

June 11 2022, Emily Mulenga, Main Character (2022)

Main Character centres around the Bunny as she experiences the abrupt end of her relationship, set against the backdrop of her life in a cyberpunk city and her evening gig as a singer. Whilst the event tears a hole in the fabric of her reality, it leads to reflections on the nature of being and what can be discovered underneath surface appearances. Flipping between 3D visuals, 2D animation and live action footage, Emily’s film takes inspiration from cartoons, video games and music videos as means to navigate the character’s relationship to life.

Register here

June 18 2022, Petra Szemán, Openings !!! (2022)

Inhabiting the interstitial zones of anime credit sequences, video game loading screens and regional train journeys, Petra Szemán’s Openings !!! intensifies the gaps between the layers of animated imagery in an attempt to grasp the kinds of experience that may lie beyond human perceptual boundaries. The video follows the protagonist ‘Yourself’ as they ride local trains through intermedial landscapes. From this uniquely conceived and drafted kinetic viewpoint, fragments of different worlds segue into view, signalling perceptual ruptures that seemingly force subjectivity outside of itself, into strange new relationships of interdependency and intoxication with the moving image.

Register here

June 25 2022, David Blandy, Androids Dream (2022)

In Androids Dream, Blandy deconstructs the cyberpunk aesthetic first prototyped by Gibson’s Neuromancer (1984) and Scott’s Blade Runner (1982), and which has continued to be repeated and become ever more ossified. Formed of multiple simulacra, the work involves Unreal Engine assets, uses Kojima’s Snatcher - itself a replay of Blade Runner in videogame form - and even deploys an algorithmic mimesis of the artist's own voice. Breaking down the aesthetic form, the film in turn breaks down, repeats, refracts, and goes into reverse. 

Register here

July 02 2022, Christian Wright, Body Language (2022)

Primarily shot within the video game Dark Souls III (2016), Body Language tells the story of an epic encounter between two online players. Focusing on how the combatants communicate via the limited body language afforded to them by the game design and the performative traditions of gaming communities, Christian’s film combines the grandiosity of cinema with the janky awkwardness of gameplay. The result is both reminiscent of videos produced and shared in insular fan communities, while also relating to a burgeoning contemporary art and academic context. 

Register here

July 09 2022, Bob Bicknell-Knight, Non-Player Character (2022)

A looping CGI video, Bob’s Non-Player Character explores the NPC as a vehicle by which we can understand human navigation of an increasingly codified and controlled existence. Controlled by the AI software, NPCs have predetermined sets of behaviours. Doomed to repeat the same day their lives revolve around the player, waiting for interaction. Bob’s film imagines what enemy NPCs are thinking and feeling, forced to be defeated over and over, until their data becomes unreadable.

Register here

Featured artists

Emily Mulenga

Emily Mulenga (b. 1991, England) is a multimedia artist who imagines what a digital utopia might look like from a feminist and milennial perspective. Her output is the result of a ravenous media diet, blending the high polish aesthetics of MTV with the jagged polygons of early PlayStation games; mixing YouTube video conventions with lo-fi social media posts of her online contacts. Contributing to the excessive circulation of digital matter, she considers how the blurring between human and machine changes experiences of womanhood, and how becoming cyborg is both a fantasy and reality, the future and the present. (instagram)

Petra Szemán

Petra Szemán (b. 1994, Gateshead) is a moving image artist whose practice focuses on the murky borderlands along the arbitrary separation of the real and the fictional. Using a virtual version of themself as a protagonist journeying through animatic realms, they explore liminal spaces and threshold situations, looking to dissect the ways our memories and selves are constructed within a fictionally oversaturated landscape (both on- and off-screen). Turning away from considering cyberspace as a radically ‘other’ realm, Petra walks the line between dystopian and utopian frameworks, eyes set on new queer horizons. (instagram)

David Blandy

David Blandy (b. 1976, Brighton) investigates the stories and cultural forces that inform and influence our behaviour. Through a gaming art practice he has written original RPGs that address issues of social justice, climate change and our potential posthuman futures. Collaboration is central to his practice, used as a means to examine communal and personal heritage, as well as forms of interdependence. His practice ranges from installation, performance, writing, gaming and sound. He has had national and international solo exhibitions, and is represented by Seventeen Gallery, London. (instagram)

Christian Wright

Christian Wright (b. 1993, Newcastle upon Tyne) is a digital media artist working with video games and animated assets to blend cinematic and machinima visual languages. Through this frame, he looks at how the boundaries of normal play are stretched by the performative actions of players themselves. Whether it be the intimate physical interactions of online multiplayer, the choreographed quest for perfection of speedrunning, or the mimetic act of digital cosplay within character creators, Christian places community driven gestures at the forefront. (instagram)

Bob Bicknell-Knight

Bob Bicknell-Knight (b. 1996, Suffolk) is a multidisciplinary artist, curator and writer influenced by surveillance capitalism and responding to internet hyper consumerism, automation and technocratic authoritarianism. Within his practice he harnesses different processes and materials to create both physical and digital artworks, including fabric printing, painting, ceramics, bookmaking, 3D printing technologies and game development software. Key subjects of investigation include our complicity with corporate giants, the sculpting of online identities and the prescient qualities of dystopian science fiction. (instagram)

Read more: Petra Széman, isthisit?: Off Site Project (Instagram accounts)

INTERVIEW: PETRA SZEMÁN, TAKE TWO

To celebrate the release of VRAL Season One, we are sharing a sneak preview of Gemma Fantacci’s new interview with Petra Szemán about her monumental project Monomyth: gaiden

In 2020, we spoke to Petra Széman about Monomyth: gaiden / Return (2019), the third installment of the epic series Monomyth: gaiden (2018-2020). Back then, she was working on the final chapter, Master of the Two Worlds, which marks the end of the journey for her digital persona, i.e., Yourself, across multiple planes of reality of the contemporary media landscape.

One year later, we reconnected with Petra in order to discuss the trajectory of Monomyth: gaiden in lieu of its latest developments. In this interview, which expands our previous discussion, Széman describes her relationship with her alter ego, the difficulty of wrapping the fragments of a multiple shared reality in a single place, and the inspiration behind an all encompassing project situated at the intersection of the epic poem and anime. Széman has created an online archive hosting the complete Monomyth: gaiden series, which also functions as a repository featuring supplemental resources, including a short visual novel, a dress up video game, a few essays and book excerpts.

Gemma Fantacci: At the beginning of Monomyth: gaiden/ Master of the two worlds, we see a beautiful image: Yourself holds an asterisk on the palm of her hand, a meeting point of multiple reality planes. Her Skyrim avatar, her 2D animation walking around the game environment, photos of Japan and a pixel art/arcade exemplify the complexity and variety of the media landscape that Yourself is navigating. I was thinking about the asterisk and its different meanings: in its typographic use, it indicates a moment of suspension but also operates as a bridge, a portal: it links to a footnote; in science, it is used as a multiplication symbol and, in computer science, it stands for a variable. It suggests different stages of being: momentary suspension and deviation from the main storyline, the multiplication of elements, and data variability. However, when her hand tries to grasp this multiplicity, the asterisk breaks down into thousands pieces, alluding to the difficulty of addressing the concept of identity and reality in a univocal way. Perhaps it is necessary to speak of identities in the plural, pointing to the various layers of reality simultaneously connected. What can you tell us about this particular scene? What role does the asterisk play both as a shape and a concept in the series?

Petra Széman: The star shape is something that I chose without any specific intentions at first. I just wanted to create a 3D shape from several screens, and the simple asterisk was an easy one to start with. My intention was to do some tests with that and then move onto building something more complex, but I found myself reaching back to the original star, and its significance became clearer with time. Until now, I hadn’t considered how the star relates to the concept of gaiden as a detour from the main line of narrative. The most important part of the star is the middle area, where all of its planes intersect. That space where everything overlaps momentarily isn’t visible, but it’s a space that contains all of the realms that build it up, and it is this elusive experience of “wholeness” or a conclusive reality that I’m trying to pinpoint in my work. At the moment, I don’t think this is comprehensible in a straightforward way, and what I’m chasing after in the videos is grasping the instability of the viewing position necessary for understanding that precise point of intersection. If I had to reduce my practice to a singular goal.

The hand reaches out and tries to hold this multiplicity, but this interaction fractures it to a thousand pieces. I’ve always been fascinated with those scenes in films when the glass breaks and you get a slow-motion view of the shards flying everywhere. In Evan Calder Willams’s Shard Cinema, he spins the whole book around this moment, using it to visualize the set of relationships between screens, perception, time, and cinema. A heightened sense of multiplicity and fragmentation.

Gemma Fantacci: “What does your avatar see as the real?”: How do you think Yourself would answer this question? This makes me think about how we tend to feel that it is our physical self pulling the strings of all our digital identities, a puppeteer directing a set of characters on a stage, when actually not a single self is more relevant than the others or holds a higher truth about our identity. As in real life, our online presence is scattered into several characters, all performing. Each role we interpret is an iteration of ourselves, and it is only the sum of them that can perhaps give us a vision of who we are. What’s your take?

Petra Széman: Turning back to the star shape, it’s at the intersection of these characters that you can pinpoint a cohesive idea of a self that envelops all of its perspectives, though I’m not really sure if you’d necessarily be able to create a shape that has a point where all of its building layers meet. The star shape is elusive. I think it’s only in specific locations that allow for the various worlds to align in that way. To attempt to map out a “true self” (using ‘true’ for lack of a better word - maybe objective? cohesive? holistic?) I’m not sure where one would have to start from. Perhaps the shapes that we can build out of these non-localized selves will always have some intermedial space between some of its layers, unable to reach into that space of certainty. This is what I think at the moment anyway, and what I can comprehend may change with time.

Something that I think about often is the places of disparity between Yourself and me, particularly when it comes to national heritage. In Japan I’m obviously white, and in the United Kingdom I’m an Eastern European immigrant. However, in terms of memories and personal history, Yourself has only ever been to Japan as far as real places are concerned, and the closest she’s been to Eastern Europe is Skyrim, which in my head basically equals the mountains and forests of the Carpathian/Pannonian Basin. So, where does my sense of ethnicity and national heritage fit within her worldview? I’m not sure. I’ve been working on some scripts where we work this out for the past few years or so.

Gemma Fantacci: While Yourself contemplates the landscape through the window of a train, your narrating voice says, “when the world outside is too oppressive to make sense of, I hold up my phone camera and force the components inside a frame”. During the pandemic, we have literally lived inside a frame. Our relationship to the screen has undoubtedly changed. On one hand, they have a protective value, while on the other they are a gateway to moments of shared conviviality. The screen has gone from being a point of interaction between different levels of reality to becoming a sort of Russian doll, with multiple layers of meaning. After the first global lockdown, how do you perceive the role of the screen in its double function of protection and access?

Petra Széman: I think the protection that the screen offers can also be a form of access: what really limits our range of motion and contact with the outside world isn’t the screen itself, but covid. The screens offer access to a shared social reality that otherwise would be entirely off-limits in this context. The idea of imposing a duality on the role of the screen doesn’t appeal to me because it echoes the real vs not-real dichotomy, whereas, for me, the value of the screens lie in the medial space that they offer and the transformative forces that they enact within the user-screen spectrum. If I think of the screens as this elusive midway realm instead of one end of a binary (screen vs. not-screen) spectrum. The pandemic has provided a heightened sense of our relationship to these screens, generally speaking, and forced many things inside this disjointed and inconclusive space, for better or worse. In my head, I think of that as an expansion of the screen-based reality, rather than its evolution... I’m not sure if I necessarily believe that anything fundamentally changed within the screens, but rather it’s horizontal movement that has occurred over the past year.

A personal anecdote. Because of the pandemic, I haven’t seen my partner for over a year now as we are in a long-distance relationship and traveling is impossible. We’ve gotten quite used to having the screen as a mediator in our relationship at this point, but the first time we got to play Animal Crossing together on the Nintendo Switch, I remember a distinct sense of bodily closeness as we ran around together with our little avatars, picking fruit and whatnot.

That was a nice moment.

Read the full interview on VRAL Season One

Visit Petra’s online archive

Also by Gemma Fantacci: EXPERIENCING LIFE AS CINEMATIC FICTION: THE MARVELOUS WITHIN THE DAILY MEDIA LANDSCAPE (full essay available in the academic journal AOQU. Achilles Orlando Quixote Ulysses)

NEWS: A CLOSER LOOK AT MONOMYTH: GAIDEN / RETURN

Monomyth: gaiden / Return (2019) is the third instalment of a tetralogy, Petra Széman’s Monomyth.

Born in Hungary and currently living in Japan, Széman is a moving image artist working with a variety of media, including video games, whose main concerns are the  notion of identity and shared reality. Through her practice, Széman explores the interstices separating existence and memory, real-life and online narrative, time and space. In her videos, the body is presented as a vessel traversing various layers of existence, both onscreen and offscreen. Memory is instrumental in making sense of such environments and experiences. Mixing game-like aesthetics, digital animation, photography, and gameplay footage, Petra narrates her own trajectory as it unfolds through different planes of reality.

A chapter in the ongoing Monomyth series, / Return uses the hero’s journey trope to investigate how real life might be experienced as a cinematic fiction. What connects all episodes is the keyword gaiden, Japanese for side story, which manga and anime fans use to indicate a parallel story set in another universe or as a follow up to the main storyline. In Petra’s work, multiple narratives are generated by the relentless interplay between the concrete and virtual self, the shift between various platforms, editing tools, and multiple storylines. 

In the first instalment, / Departure (2018), Széman questions her own relationship to a digital avatar named “Yourself” and her evolution through a multilayered image world. The surrounding environment becomes an active agent of narratives “oversaturated with movies and fiction”, as she puts it.

Petra Széman, Monomyth: gaiden / Initiation, digital color, sound, 2019, 12’ 13”

The second chapter, / Initiation (2019), introduce novel ways to conceive multiple layers of experience coexisting within an increasingly decentralized self.  The character’s motion is presented as a series of anecdotes of pilgrimages inspired by pop culture. The linearity of the cinematic fiction is disrupted by the rhizomatic nature of Széman’s storytelling.

Petra Széman, Monomyth: gaiden / Initiation, digital video, color, sound, 2019, 12’ 57”

Travel is another recurrent theme. Like the loading screen sequence that precedes the avatar’s introduction to a virtual world, the train is a liminal space where time is stretched and expanded. A plurality of points of view generate a fragmented reality. The traveller occupies more than one place at a time: a two hours journey and a two minute video highlights become indistinguishable. As space collapses, time is compressed. 

In 2019, Széman released How to enter a fictional realm / TUTORIAL (2017) which was presented at the MILAN MACHINIMA FESTIVAL. A prelude to the monomyth series, / TUTORIAL is an instructional guide for hypothetical travelers of Tamriel, the idyllic setting of Elder Scrolls: Skyrim (Bethesda Game Studios, 2011). Adopting the format of a YouTube tutorial, the video invites the viewer to consider the relationship between two entities, the player and her alter ego, raising questions about such notions as identity, memory, and storytelling, which play a key role in each installment of the Monomyth series, a work that succeeds in being simultaneously personal and meta referential.

Petra Széman, How to enter a fictional realm / TUTORIAL, 2019, digital video, color, sound, 8’ 18”.

Széman is currently working on the fourth and concluding part of the series, Master of Two Worlds.

Gemma Fantacci

EVENT: VRAL #4_PETRA SZÉMAN (JUNE 19 - JULY 2 2020)

MONOMYTH: GAIDEN/RETURN

digital video, color, sound, 12’ 07”, 2020 (Hungary)

Creatwd by Petra Széman

Introduced by Gemma Fantacci

Monomyth: gaiden / Return (2019) is the third installment in the ongoing Monomyth: gaiden series (2018-). Structured around the trope of the hero’s journey, it investigates how real life might be experienced as a mediated narrative, focusing on such notions as digital identity, presence, memory, and storytelling. In / Return, the protagonist leaves the Underworld behind and returns to her so-called real life. But is such a reversion possible as the self is inextricably scattered across a network of virtual realms, platforms, and personae? Is narrative closure possible in the age of infinite scrolling?

Born in Budapest, Hungary, Petra Szemán is a moving image artist working with animation and game-like immersive installations. Her practice is centered around instances in which real life can be experienced as fictional. Using a virtual version of herself as a protagonist across various digital realms, she explores liminal spaces and threshold situations, looking to dissect the ways our memories and selves are constructed within a landscape oversaturated with fiction both on- and off-screen. Rejecting the idea of cyberspace as a radically alternative realm, Petra walks the line situated between dystopia and utopia. Petra is a recent Fine Art graduate from Newcastle University (2013-2017) and has exhibited since graduation at NEoN Festival in Dundee, Scotland; Big Screen Southend; BALTIC Centre for Contemporary Art in Gateshead, as well as various galleries across the North East of England. She is currently based in Tsukuba, Japan, developing new work as a recipient of a research scholarship from the Japanese Ministry of Education and Culture (2018-2020).

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