Thailand

MMF MMXXIII UPDATE: A CHAT WITH MARTIN BELL

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Martin Bell

The Milan Machinima Festival is currently featuring Martin Bell's groundbreaking machinima PRAZINBURK RIDGE in the Counter-Narratives program, alongside three other works. Based on a true story, the machinima is set during World War One, and stars former rugby player for Great Britain Douglas Clark. The athlete finds himself on the Belgian battlefields of Ypres and must rely on his old skills to save himself and his fellow soldiers from shot, shell and poison gas.

Martin Bell has been creating computer graphics all his life. Originally from a Yorkshire mining community, Martin moved to London and became a CG artist over 15 years ago. As an animator and film visualization supervisor, he has created huge action sequences for Hollywood productions such as Jurassic World, James Bond, Marvel, Fast & Furious, 1917, Aladdin, the DC Universe and The Wheel of Time. His first short, PRAZINBURK RIDGE premiered at Wigan & Leigh Film Festival 2022, a BIFA-qualifying festival, where it won the award for Best Animation. It was also selected for SPARK Animation Festival in Vancouver, Clones Film Festival, Tbilisi International Animation Festival, and Dispatches of War Festival among others.

We talked to Martin Bell about his practice as a machinimaker and his first solo project, PRAZINBURK RIDGE.

Matteo Bittanti: Can you describe your trajectory from CGI wizard to filmmaker? What led you to explore cinema as a medium and as an artform?

Martin Bell: I always wanted to make films. When I was eleven, I tried to make an Aliens sequel using DeluxePaint IV on my Amiga: that was probably my first unfinished project, many more would follow. 

Jurassic Park was what sealed it for me though, when dinosaurs suddenly came alive in front of me. I knew I wanted to be a part of that. In my CGI/VFX career I have always tried to steer myself towards the most creative roles possible – I wanted to be an animator to create my own stories, not necessarily other people’s stories. So eventually I ended up in film previsualisation for Jurassic World: Fallen Kingdom and found that to be a role I could be creative in, while contributing to a film franchise I loved. Later, the opportunity to supervise previs came along, and put me in an even more creative position. But meanwhile the desire to create my own films had been growing, and I’d been writing scripts. I’d been introduced briefly to Unreal Engine and knew it could potentially be something I could utilise but I hadn’t had chance to learn it yet, and then Covid-19 hit.

Matteo Bittanti: Very apropos... There’s a new generation of innovative filmmakers that was born during the Covid-19 lockdown. Forced indoors and unclear about the future, hundreds of creative types around the world began experimenting with different kinds of tools and storytelling techniques. Does this story sound familiar to you?

Martin Bell: Oh, very much so! Covid-19 and the associated lockdowns were awful, but I was conscious that it provided an opportunity to reset things, to take stock and think about what might be next. Without any work to focus on and no creative outlet, I knew I needed to make something, and with the time available I could learn Unreal Engine finally. So I decided I’d make a little three-minute short or something, in Unreal, just as a learning exercise. And PRAZINBURK RIDGE was born.

(continues)

Matteo Bittanti

Works cited

Martin Bell

PRAZINBURK RIDGE

digital video/machinima, color, sound, 10’, 2022, England

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MMF MMXXIII UPDATE: A CHAT WITH BRENTON ALEXANDER SMITH

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The Milan Machinima Festival is delighted to introduce Brenton Alexander Smith's The Impossibility of Things Disappearing. Featured in The Neo Avant-garde program, Smith's work will be available between March 19-26 2023 exclusively on the MMF website.

His previous machinima Things Are Different Now, was featured in 2020 as part of VRAL. Read an interview by Luca Miranda here. 

Brenton Alexander Smith is an Australian artist whose work delves into the intricate interplay between humanity and technology. He creates pieces that evoke a range of emotions, from discomfort to nostalgia, and draws on a variety of media, both digital and tangible, to craft immersive installations that feature both sculptural and video components. One of Smith’s primary concerns is addressing the cultural anxieties that arise from our dependence on technology. His work reflects this by imbuing machine detritus with human-like qualities and expressions. The result is a thought-provoking commentary on our relationship with technology and the role it plays in shaping our lives. Smith earned a Master’s degree in Fine Arts from the University of NSW in Australia in 2020, and his work has been exhibited internationally, as well as in his hometown of Sydney. His solo exhibitions include I Feel Like a Nervous Wreck (2019) at the virtual gallery of Closed on Monday Gallery and Together with Machines (2015) at the Akureyri Art Museum in Iceland. He has also participated in The Wrong Biennale (2019) in Valencia, Spain, and received the Friedman Foundation Travelling Scholarship in 2014.

In the following interview, Brenton Alexander Smith discusses the main inspirations behind his new artwork:

Matteo Bittanti: The impossibility of things disappearing is a captivating exploration of the intersection between life and death, and the notion of agency beyond the living. Can you speak to the inspiration behind this work, and how you approached creating a sense of liveliness and movement in a desiccated fish?

Brenton Alexander Smith: This work started as a technical challenge that I set for myself. I’ve worked with BeamNg.drivebefore to make similar kinds of videos but it was always within the constraints of the car theme of the game. I would use mods that other people have created to open up new ways of making, but the subject matter always began with a car. I wanted to see if I could put something else into the simulation to see how it would behave. I set about learning how to make my own mod for the game.

The idea was to replace the car with something different, perhaps something organic. I decided to go with the desiccated fish because it was part of an old video artwork I made during a residency in Iceland that I had been meaning to expand on. It was a video of a factory machine that packaged fish to be sent to Nigeria to be used as soup stock. I took a screenshot from the video and selected one of the dried fish from the image to be turned into a 3D object.

I think about the work in terms of resurrection. The original fish has surely been turned into soup by now, but here we see its specter rotating on screen. This is partly what I’m getting at with the title of the work. Matter doesn’t disappear, it can only become something new. In the same way images (like the fish) can be reused, reinterpreted and resurrected.

Matteo Bittanti: BeamNG.drive was designed to simulate the experience of driving with “realistic” physics. By using it to create an artwork, you subverted its intended purpose, well beyond your previous works. Can you address the role of BeamNG.drive in the creation of this piece, and how the simulation’s realistic physics affected the final product? Also, can you describe the process of creating the mod and how it enabled you to use the game’s physics simulation as an “animation” technique? Is this the first installment of a new series, à la The Soft Crash (2020)?

(continues)

Matteo Bittanti

Works cited

Brenton Alexander Smith

The Impossibility of Things Disappearing

digital video/machinima, color, sound, 6’ 10”, 2022, Australia

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MMF MMXXIII UPDATE: A CHAT WITH MANUEL GHIDINI

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The Milan Machinima Festival is happy to present Manuel Ghidini’s OccupyCAD, which appropriates and recontextualizes the protagonist from the Occupy Mars video game to suggest alternative possibilities for space exploration and to think about the very notion of “space”. Featured in the Made in Italy program, Ghidini's work will be available between March 19-26 2023 exclusively on the MMF website.

Manuel Ghidini was born in Gardone Val Trompia, an industrial stronghold in Northern Italy, in 1997. Ghidini’s upbringing in the City-workshop of Lumezzane heavily influenced his artistic practice. After completing his studies in Brescia, Ghidini moved to Milan to attend Brera Academy of Fine Arts, where he began to interrogate the perceptive questions of reality. Ghidini’s work investigates epistemology through the visual arts. He currently lives and works in Lumezzane.

In the following interview, Ghidini discusses the main inspirations behind his new artwork:

Matteo Bittanti: How does the artwork’s (re)use of a video game character challenge conventional notions of the representation of space in art, and how does this recontextualization of the character invite viewers to engage with space in novel, different ways?

Manuel Ghidini: The use of a video game and its resources, such as characters and settings, allows one to operate within the original imagery in a subversive way. Video games are an increasingly popular medium, especially among younger people, including my own generation. Video games, like music and film, have always been a great medium for information and propaganda. The appropriation and the reuse of video games and their assets make it possible to move into this sphere. Considering the games’ economic success - they overtook both the film and music industry a while ago -, they are becoming increasingly relevant and decisive in the dissemination of ideas and values in the cultural landscape. They too, like other media, construct narratives and representations of the self and of the Other.

An integral part of our cultural context, video games consciously or unconsciously reproduce the logics that underlie the capitalist exploitation of resources, often constructing the game in a competitive environment based on scores and unequivocal outcomes (note 1). This is not a necessary requirement by any means, but it seems to me that most if not all mainstream games tend to be based on these characteristics. Without competition or difficulty, video games are perceived as boring, thus “failed”.

Therefore, the reuse of game resources allows for the reshaping of their narratives, for a reimagining of their ideology, for a process of deconstruction of their imagery. Such a process allows for a focus on additional issues, giving the work more nuances and layers of meaning. It also stimulates additional interpretive senses.

I see OccupyCAD as an attempt to resurface that discarded but somehow always-already-present element of the original Occupy Mars video game. I refer to the discarded concerning the implications of what the act of Martian colonization, of occupying new spaces, new worlds, new means. Ignoring current global issues, from climate crises to social crises – not addressing the issue of climate change, except by making it the validating justification for abandoning Earth for a new world within a logic of sheer disposability. Considering the large number of young gamers, we can imagine the influence of these kinds of messages. I’m referring to young people who may or may not complete the mission to conquer Mars. Their will, like ours, is decisive. The use of game resources – of the main character in particular – gave me the chance to remove the cosmetics, the facade of the game and to focus instead on the main issue, the perennial race for survival, with its consequences. Working on the discarded, understood as the recovery of an issue, is of primary importance, and has not been addressed properly. I’m attempting to focus on the real problem we face as a species, by deconstructing the narrative.

Beginning with the operation accomplished with OccupyCAD, the reconsideration of aspects and reflections regarding the game, not foreseen in the original, can also arise in the spectator. I was, therefore, attempting to stimulate critical thinking about the existent in innovative ways, even with respect to machinima itself. The reuse of video game elements, thus, becomes a reactivation, a purposeful response and an act of reappropriation. A refocusing on something deliberately ignored by the original video game. An opportunity for reuse, reinterpretation of the video game. An exercise and a call to reimagine the cultural resources contained in a video game (as elsewhere) by reshaping them and being able to subvert them. The gesture of reappropriating and activating in reconstruction, acting and reacting in the cultural space of co-narrative.

Matteo Bittanti: How does OccupyCAD explore the tension between freedom and constraint, and how does the astronaut’s relentless movement within the confined space of the 3D graphics software relate to broader societal issues surrounding control, surveillance, and agency?

(continues)

Matteo Bittanti

Work cited

Manuel Ghidini

OccupyCAD

digital video/machinima, color, sound, 5’ 29”, 2022, Italy

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MMF MMXXIII UPDATE: A CHAT WITH LUCA GIACOMELLI

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The Milan Machinima Festival is delighted to present Luca Giacomelli’s, A Report for Humanity which adapts Kafka’s tale “A Report for an Academy”, using selected voiceovers to accompany imagery recorded from various video games such as Red Dead Redemption 2, GTA V, Space Explorer, Battlefield V, and FIFA 23. Featured in the Made in Italy program, Giacomelli's work will be available between March 19-26 2023 exclusively on the MMF website.

Luca Giacomelli was born in 1995 and he is currently enrolled in the New Technologies of Art Program at the Academy of Fine Arts in Carrara, Italy. His main interests are cinema, photography, and video art. He directed several shorts, including Dogs (2019, with Matteo Marchi), which was influenced by Werner Herzog, Andrei Tarkovskij, and Godfrey Reggio. His work What is Happening in Our City? was presented at the Milan Machinima Festival in 2020. Giacomelli lives and works in Carrara.

In the following interview, Giacomelli discusses the main inspirations behind his new artwork:

Matteo Bittanti: What inspired you to use Franz Kafka’s “A Report for an Academy” as a reference point for your latest machinima, and what drew you to the themes and messages of the story?

Luca Giacomelli: I have always been fascinated by poems and fiction — especially short stories — that succeed in describing, in a direct, raw, visceral and at the same time lucid and prophetic, the state and soul of humanity, both universally and individually. Examples includes Edgar Allan Poe’s short story “The Silence,” Guy de Maupassant’s “The Horla,” and several short stories by Kafka. Literature in general is what inspires me the most. Specifically, “A Report for an Academy” inspired me mainly because of the point of view in which one is forced to look, in an absolutely objective, realistic way, at the habits of human beings. Kafka chooses a monkey as an “empty vessel” to be filled with human customs and habits and as an impartial figure through whom he describes us, but it can also be seen as a point of view of an infant forced to live and deal with the so-called civilization in which he has to find a role and a task; of course “imitating” what is in front of him. And what does the narrator of Kafka’s story do but try to survive, adapting to his new environment? Through evolution into “civilized” man we have left behind the freedom of nature for the cage that is modern civilization, where our best chance of camouflage and survival comes from creating a kind of performance. All the monkey’s actions after his capture constitute a performance, but it is a performance that gradually becomes more conscious. What used to be instinctive has now turned into rational decision-making, and “performing” has changed from something it does to blend in to something it does to live.

Matteo Bittanti: How did you select the specific video games used in the artwork, and what factors did you consider as representative of “human habits, moments, and vicissitudes”? How does the use of video games as a medium highlight these themes and make them more accessible to a contemporary audience? How does the use of machinima and video games in this artwork challenge traditional artistic mediums and add a unique layer of meaning to Kafka’s story? What was the thought process behind choosing these particular games and how do they contribute to the artwork’s overall message? 

(continues)

Matteo Bittanti

Work cited

Luca Giacomelli

A Report for Humanity

digital video/machinima, color, sound, 4’ 27”, 2022, Italy

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MMF MMXXIII UPDATE: A CHAT WITH KENT SHEELY

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The Milan Machinima Festival is thrilled to announce the on-site screening of Kent Sheeely’s machinima Welcome Back. Sheely’s work offers a timely reflection on the highly anticipated return to “normalcy” following the global pandemic. Using Transport Fever (Urban Games, 2016) as his primary source material, Sheely masterfully appropriates and manipulates the game’s realistic infrastructure-building mechanics to create a thought-provoking exploration of the world that awaits us post-Covid.

At first glance, Transport Fever’s immersive gameplay mechanics appear to offer a straightforward and engaging experience, allowing players to construct and manage their own transportation networks across different eras. However, as Sheely suggests through his artful manipulation of the game’s content in order to trigger glitches and visual anomalies, the journey towards a state of “normalcy” may prove to be far more disconcerting and unsettling than we ever imagined.

Kent Sheely (b. 1984, United States) is a new media artist based in Los Angeles. His work draws both inspiration and foundation from the aesthetics and culture of video games, examining the relationships between real and imagined worlds. Much of his work centers around the translation and transmediation of symbols, concepts, and expectations from game space to the real world and vice versa, forming new bridges between simulation and lived reality.

Matteo Bittanti: As the Covid-19 pandemic continues to linger in our collective memory, it remains a paradoxical experience, insofar as it feels both fresh and remote. As an artist, how did you navigate this unprecedented moment in history? What were your personal encounters with this global crisis? Did it function as a harbinger of more catastrophic events to come, or was it “simply” a significant historical outlier? Moreover, how did you reconcile yourself with the concept of the “new normal,” and what coping mechanisms did you deploy to manage the tumultuous and ever-changing landscape of the pandemic? In essence, how did you perceive, process, and ultimately respond to this momentous period of crisis and upheaval that you represent with/in Welcome Back?

Kent Sheely: In March of 2020, I was working a full-time job in downtown Los Angeles, taking a bus to and from the office each day. When central management called to inform everyone we’d be working from home for a while (they thought it would only last a week!), it was just a fun change of pace for me and my coworkers at first; nobody knew how bad the spread of Covid already was, or that it would only get worse and impact our daily lives for years to come.

I quickly adjusted to doing the job from my home office, but after a few weeks of quarantine and constantly reading news about the escalating impact of the virus, cabin fever took hold and I actually got pretty depressed. Nobody knew when it would be over, or what the lasting effects would be, especially as weeks turned to months with no end in sight and no indication of how bad it would truly get. I tried to keep myself busy to curb the catastrophic thoughts and “what-ifs” that were constantly popping up. I spent a lot of time online with friends and found small projects for myself around the apartment, but I didn’t feel like making art for a really long time.

I eventually did find the motivation to start managing my feelings through my art practice, and the floodgates just opened up; there was a period where everything I made was in service of processing the tragedy and surreality of the new cursed world. Honestly I think that means of self-expression is what ended up helping me adjust the most.

Matteo Bittanti: As evidenced by Welcome Back, you have appropriated and manipulated Transport Fever to create a thought-provoking, visually stunning work of art. Could you share with us your personal connection to this particular simulation game and how it became a creative outlet for you? How did you negotiate the interplay between the mechanics of the game and your artistic vision, and ultimately leverage the affordances of the medium to give shape to your expression? Can you share your intent, methodology, and thought processes behind the production of this captivating machinima?

Kent Sheely: I was really into management simulators when I was younger, with games like SimCity 2000, Shortline Railroad and Rollercoaster Tycoon being a few early favorites. On a nostalgic lark a few years ago I picked up Transport Fever and spent quite a few evenings setting up and maintaining infrastructure between cities via road, rail, air and sea. I didn’t make my first artwork with the game until I moved to…

(continues)

Matteo Bittanti

Work cited

Kent Sheely

Welcome back

digital video, sound, 4’ 35”, 2022, United States of America

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MMF MMXXIII UPDATE: A CHAT WITH NANUT THANAPORNRAPEE

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The Milan Machinima Festival is proud to present Nanut Thanapornrapee’s This History is Auto-Generated: A Tale of Two Thailands which reinterprets Thailand’s political history with the aid of GPT-3, an AI text generator. A Tale of Two Thailand setting in an alternative future where Thailand is divided into two states: an anarchist state and a military shogunate. 

Nanut Thanapornrapee is a visual artist who uses essay images and a participatory approach to explore the meta-narrative and history of people and technology. He graduated in Journalism and Mass Communication (with a major in photography and filmmaking) at Thammasat University. In 2021 he participated with Baan Norg Collaborative Art and Culture to create HAWIWI: I Wish I Wrote a History which experiments on meta-narrative by writing a history of Ratchabur, a city in Western Thailand, via card game and participatory with locals including high schooler and elementary students. In 2021 he received the Prince Claus Seed Award and participated in a mobile lab program at Documenta 15.

Gemma Fantacci discussed This History is Auto-Generated: A Tale of Two Thailands with the artist:

Gemma Fantacci: In the words of Paul Marino, machinima refers to “the real-time production of animated films within a 3D virtual environment using video games.” However, recent year’s developments show how machinima has evolved into different formats, blending with other artistic languages, and thus taking a hybrid form. For some, it remains a technique, while for others it has become a medium in its own right, one in which gameplay and game space lose all connection to the original video game to be refunctionalized within counter narratives that reflect on instances related to today’s political and social situations, or on the problematic issues of video game culture. When did you find out about machinima for the first time and how did you begin to incorporate video game elements into your work?

Nanut Thanapornrapee: In the research phase of This History is Auto-Generated, I have read Alfie Bown’s The Playstation Dreamworld (2017), which discusses the tendency of video games to represent the capitalist ideology but also how video games could become an anti-capitalist tool as well. Therefore I started to research and contemplate video games from different perspectives, aside from entertainment, and especially game streaming content which is growing popular in Thailand. Many streamers create their own style of storytelling which is not limited to the context of the games they are playing, but implements their narratives as well. That is when I started to use machinima as one of my practices in this project. The juxtaposition of  several video games’ contexts creates bizarre experiences and alternative ways to interpret and represent narratives and history, which I find more enjoyable in terms of making and viewing.

(continues)

Gemma Fantacci

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