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ARTICLE: FOLDERS FULL OF BODIES

VRAL is currently showcasing Chris Kerich’s latest project Three Impossible Worlds. To accompany the exhibition, we’ll be discussing several artworks that comprise his oeuvre. Today, we examine his monumental project Piles (2018).

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Piles is a video art project that explores the symbolic and political dimensions of piling up dead or unconscious bodies in video games. Between 2020-2021, the artist, Chris Kerich, livestreamed over 22 hours of gameplay footage on Twitch of him creating piles of bodies across seven different video games. His goal was to turn an uncritical and common practice in gaming communities into a critical interrogation of how games incorporate concepts of life, death, and bodies into their design.

The games selected represent a mix of big-budget productions titles like Hitman, independent games like Viscera Cleanup Detail (which we presented within the context of the 2021 Milan Machinima Festival in a 80 minute cut), and a game creation platform, Tabletop Simulator. This range allows for different perspectives on the theme. The piles created are meant to evoke real-life piles of bodies from sites of atrocity, like Abu Ghraib, where Kerich sees resonances with the unconstrained power to violate bodies often granted to players in games. As a straight white American man, Kerich implicates himself and his own position of power in creating these spectacles…

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Matteo Bittanti

Works cited

Chris Kerich

Piles (excerpt)

digital video/machinima (1152 x 720), color, sound, 14”, 2018-2020, United States.

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EVENT: FILIP KOSTIC (SEPTEMBER 29 - OCTOBER 12 2023, ONLINE)

Filip Kostic VS Filip Kostic

digital video, color, sound (1920 x 1080), color, sound, 16’ 28”, 2019, Serbia/United States

Created by Filip Kostic

Online premiere (new edit)

Filip Kostic VS Filip Kostic (2019) is a performative artwork by artist Filip Kostic, staged as a live Twitch stream. In the piece, Kostic plays a match of FIFA Soccer against Serbian athlete Filip Kostic, who shares his name and nationality. The prize at stake is the @filipkostic Instagram handle. For years, Kostic’s online identity was conflated with that of the athlete due to sharing a name and IMDb page. After being contacted by Kostic’s PR team to purchase his Instagram handle, the artist instead proposed this competitive FIFA face-off to settle the score. Presented as an eSports event, the Twitch stream featured a custom layout with sponsors and a halftime show performance. It is now presented on VRAL in a novel edit.

Filip Kostic is an interdisciplinary artist working across video, performance, sculpture, and interactive media. His video and new media works have been shown internationally at venues including Ars Electronica Festival, Ujazdowski Castle Center for Contemporary Art, and SPRING/BREAK Art Show. He has exhibited sculpture and installation works at galleries in the US and Europe. Kostic holds an MFA from Bard College and a BFA from ArtCenter College of Design, where he currently teaches in the Interaction Design and Fine Art departments. He has previously taught at Otis College of Art & Design and Cal State Northridge. From 2018-2021, he worked as a technical artist and game designer at WEVR on VR experiences for the Harry Potter franchise. Through his multimedia practice, Kostic invites viewers to examine and challenge assumptions about identity, reality, and the role of technology in shaping human experience. His work aims to collapse boundaries between the real and the simulated. Originally from Belgrade, Serbia, he is currently based in Los Angeles.

EVENT: KAMILIA KARD (DECEMBER 2 2022, 9 PM CET, LIVE)

The MILAN MACHINIMA FESTIVAL is delighted to announce its first machinima live performance on its brand new Twitch channel. Curated by Gemma Fantacci, the inaugural show is Kamilia Kard’s Toxic Garden - DANCE DANCE DANCE. Join us tonight Friday December 2 at 9 pm Central European Time (CET)!

Toxic Garden - DANCE DANCE DANCE is an online participatory performance created within Toxic Garden, a unique map designed by the artist for Roblox (Roblox Corporation, 2006) in which participants can perform a common dance by donning custom skins that change randomly. A visual commentary on toxic human behaviors, DANCE DANCE DANCE is inspired by the defense mechanisms of poisonous plants. Its development took place during the residency at Lavanderia a Vapore and it involved dancers who contributed in the creation of the choreography. Designed and developed by Kamilia Kard, aka KKlovesU4E. Music of the Performance by Raffaella Bresciani. Sound design of Toxic Garden’s map by Cristina Katja Angeloro.

Kamilia Kard is an artist and scholar based in Milan. Her research explores how hyper-connectivity and new forms of online communication have modified and influenced the perception of the human body, as well as our gestures, feelings and emotions. Her practice spans from digital paintings to websites, from video installations to 3D printed sculptures, from interactive virtual environments and video games to AR facial filters. Her work has been exhibited internationally in museums, galleries, public spaces and online venues. Highlights include: A.dition Gallery, South Korea (2022), Careof, Milan (2021); Marséll, Milan (2021); Museo Pino Pascali, Polignano a Mare (2021); Milan Machinima Festival (2021); Galerie Odile Ouizeman, Paris (2020); Sorbonne Nouvelle, Paris (2020); Dimora Artica, Milan (2020); Olomouc Museum of Art (2020); Metronom, Modena (2018, 2019 and 2020); EP7, Paris (2019); Victoria and Albert Museum, London (2018); iMAL, Brussels (2018); Digitalive @ REF, Rome (2018); Fotomuseum Winterthur, Switzerland (2017); Triennale di Milano (2017); Centro Cultural São Paulo (2017); La Quadriennale di Roma (2016); Ludwig Museum, Budapest (2015); Hypersalon, Miami (2015); The Wrong Biennial, online (2014); Museo del Novecento, Milan (2013). She is the author of Arte e Social Media. Generatori di sentimenti (Postmedia Books 2022) and the editor of Alpha Plus. An Anthology of Digital Art (Editorial Vortex 2017). She often lectures about her artistic practice and research. She has a Ph.D in Digital Humanities (University of Genova), and she teaches Multimedia Communication and Aesthetics of New Media at Accademia di Brera in Milan, Italy.

To watch the perform, please visit

MMF_VRAL on Twitch

Kamilia Kard

Toxic Garden - DANCE DANCE DANCE

December 2 2022 at 9 PM CET, free

The edited video recording will be available on December 3 2022.

ARTICLE: A CLOSER LOOK AT SEBASTIAN SCHMIEG'S LIGHTS WILL GUIDE YOU HOME

Sebastian Schmeig, Nice (LFMN) – Edinburgh (EGPH), video recording, 180’, 2015

ON SCHMEIG’S LONG STANDING FASCINATION FOR THE ART OF VIRTUAL FLYING…

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Lights will guide you home is an iteration of an ongoing project by Sebastian Schmieg originally presented at panke.gallery in January 2022, Lights will guide you home (take off) and at /rosa  Lights will guide you home(landing) both in Berlin, the latter being a new project space jointly run by panke.gallery and Zentrum für Netzkunst (ZfN) focusing on researching and exhibiting net art and net culture. Lights will guide you home was originally conceived as a multi-channel installation, and was subsequently edited as a single-channel video recording for VRAL where it can be watched until July 7. 

However, Schmieg’s fascination for flight simulators is far from recent. In fact, it goes back to at least 2015, when he produced Nice (LFMN) – Edinburgh (EGPH), a three hour long screen recording of a virtual flight by a gamer streaming on Amazon’s platform, Twitch.tv. The project was originally created for a group exhibition entitled Wasting time on the Internet 2.0, curated by Thomas Spallek, Laura Catania, and Yvonique Wellen at Kunsthalle Düsseldorf. 

Nice (LFMN) – Edinburgh (EGPH) is an appropriation and re-contextualization of a ludic performance by a player with a small, almost negligible following…

Matteo Bittanti

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EVENT: SEBASTIAN SCHMIEG (JUNE 24 - JULY 7 2022, ONLINE)

Lights will guide you home

digital video/machinima (1920 x 1080), color, sound, 10’ 17”, 2022, Germany

Created by Sebastian Schmieg

On Twitch and YouTube, gamers stream their journeys over a replica of our world using flight simulators — some curious, others dutiful, and quite a few in the service of virtual airlines following official schedules. In the course of their missions, they are often guided by other gamers who participate as air traffic controllers. Sebastian Schmieg regularly watches both pilots and air traffic controllers and collects and archives their virtual work. In his video Lights will guide you home, pilots drive to the runway, accelerate, and take off, soaring into the skies of Microsoft Flight Simulator before landing safely at their destination – always accompanied by air traffic controllers.

Sebastian Schmieg investigates the algorithmic circulation of images, texts, and bodies. He creates playful interventions that penetrate the shiny surfaces of our networked society and explore the realities that lie behind them. Specifically, Schmieg focuses on labor, algorithmic management, and artificial intelligence. He works in a wide range of media including video, website, installation, artist book, custom software, lecture performance, and delivery service. Schmieg’s work has been exhibited internationally at The Photographers’ Gallery London, MdbK Leipzig, HeK Basel, and Chronus Art Center Shanghai. He lives and works in Berlin and Dresden.

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