BOOK: VRAL S03 IS NOW AVAILABLE

Edited by Matteo Bittanti, Gemma Fantacci, Luca Miranda, Riccardo Retez
Release date: August 2 2023 (S), August 5 2023 (Rest of the world)
Series: GAME VIDEO/ART STUDIES
Features: Softcover, 332 pages, 186 color illustrations
Format: 6×9 inches, 15×23 cm
Language: English
ISBN: 9798854159364
Price: $/€ 22,99

Introduced in April 2020 amidst a global pandemic, VRAL is an online platform offering screenings of machinima created by artists and filmmakers whose work lies at the intersection of video art, cinema, animation, and gaming. The program features outstanding video works selected on the basis of their cultural relevance, artistic achievement, and innovative style. This book collects all Season Three interviews (i.e., exhibitions 44 to 64) Featured artists: Felix Klee, Elisa Sanchez, Jason Rouse, Sebastian Schmieg, Letta Shtohryn, Federica Di Pietrantonio, Iain Douglas and Mark Coverdale, Zuza Banasińka, Gina Hara, Babak Ahteshamipour, Martina Menegon, Christian Wright, Alix Desaubliaux, Steven Cottingham, Kamilia Kard, Jordy Veenstra, Thomas Hawranke, Lasse Scherfigg, Calum Rodger, Jake Couri, Søren Thilo Funder, and Simonetta Fadda.

Both a critical and creative laboratory, GAME VIDEO/ART. STUDIES promotes open dialogue, constructive debate, and sometimes idiosyncratic investigations of ideas, practices, and artefacts that – by their very nature – occupy different layers of today’s visual culture. Using a comparative rather than specialized approach, GAME VIDEO/ART. STUDIES probes the most diverse visual experiences inspired by digital gaming and gives voice to a new generation of researchers as well as established scholars.

NOW AVAILABLE ON/ORA DISPONIBILE SU

AMAZON US, AMAZON ITALIA, AMAZON UK, AMAZON DE, AMAZON FR

LINK: VRAL S03

EVENT: SIMONETTA FADDA (MARCH 31 - APRIL 13 2023, ONLINE)

GAME OVER

One channel video (SD, 676x540), color, sound, 4’ 27”, 2002 Italy

Created by Simonetta Fadda

Driving at night in the video game-like suburban French city of Enghien Les Bains can be an exciting or demoralizing experience, depending on the driver or, perhaps, on the filmmaker. Simonetta Fadda’s carscapes are both delirious and hyper-real, suggesting a toxic convergence of realities.

Born in Savona, Simonetta Fadda is an artist, educator, essayist, and translator. Her teaching activities include the Accademia Albertina di Belle Arti, Turin and Accademia di Belle Arti di Brera, Milan. Since the Eighties, she has been working with video art. Her artworks are featured in public and private collections in Italy and in Europe. She participated in major international events such as Movimenta – Biennale de l’image en mouvement, projet Mondes Flottants: Grandes Images, Nice, France (2017) and Parallel Program of the 13th Istanbul Biennial, Institut Français d’Istanbul, Istanbul (2013). In Italy she was featured, among others, at Festival del Nuovo Cinema di Pesaro, Pesaro – Italy (in We Want Cinema: cinema e video di ricerca 2018, and in Satellite 2016) and Bergamo Film Meeting, Bergamo – Italy (2010). A prolific writer and critic, Fadda is the author of the seminal Definition zero: origins of video art between politics and communication (Costa & Nolan, 1999), the first Italian study on video as a medium of art and political activism, which was reprinted in an expanded format in 2017 by Meltemi Edizioni. In 2020, Franco Angeli published her new book, Media and art. She also translated into Italian and edited Gene Youngblood’s seminal book Expanded Cinema.

EVENT: CALUM RODGER (JANUARY 20 - February 9 2023, ONLINE)

ROCK, STAR, NORTH

Digital video (1920 x 1080), color, sound, 23’ 05”, 2016-2022, Scotland

Created by Calum Rodger

In 2016, inspired by Basho, William Wordsworth and Nan Shepherd, Glasgow-based poet Calum Rodger undertook a poetic odyssey inside San Andreas, Grand Theft Auto V’s hyperreal replica of California. In 2017, he chronicled his journey in a 20-minute performance poem titled Rock, Star, North, which premiered at the Scottish Storytelling Centre in Edinburgh in May of that year. In 2021, the poem achieved its final form: a machinipoem, composed entirely of footage from the game, alongside an all-new reading and updated text, which we are now presenting as part of VRAL S03.

Calum Rodger is a Glasgow-based poet working in print, performance and digital forms. He was Scottish National Slam Champion 2019 and holds a Doctorate in Scottish Literature from the University of Glasgow. In the last few years, he has worked extensively at the intersection of poetry and gaming.

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EVENT: STEVEN COTTINGHAM (NOVEMBER 18 - DECEMBER 1 2022, ONLINE)

Chain-link

single-channel HD video (1920 x 1080, MPEG-4 AAC, H.264) comprising machinima, 3D animation, and found footage with sound, 90’ 1”, 2022, Canada

Created by Steven Cottingham

WORLD PREMIERE

Bruce Sterling famously stated that the future is “old men, in cities, afraid of the sky”. In Steven Cottingham’s cyberpunk masterpiece filmed with/in an unrecognizable Grand Theft Auto V, Chain-link, the future is even more nightmarish: pervasive surveillance, carceral capitalism, and techno-feudalism.

Steven Cottingham is an artist based in Vancouver. His work concerns the politics of visualization. Recent exhibitions include Natalia Hug Galerie (Cologne, 2022), Artists Space (New York, 2022), The Polygon Gallery (North Vancouver, 2021), and Catriona Jeffries (Vancouver, 2021). From 2018 to 2021, Cottingham co-edited the art theory periodical QOQQOON, and in 2021–2022 he participated in the Whitney Independent Study Program. Chain–link (2022) is his first feature film.

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EVENT: ALIX DESAUBLIAUX (OCTOBER 28 - NOVEMBER 10 2022, ONLINE)

L’AUTRE MONSTRE (THE OTHER MONSTER)

digital video/machinima (1920x1080), color, sound, 48’ 59”, 2021, France (in French with English subtitles)

Created by Alix Desaubliaux

L’Autre Monster (The Other Monster) is an experimental film created with/in Monster Hunter World (Capcom, 2018). A contemplative immersion in a fantasy universe, this machinima examines the affective nature of playing. The artist appropriated a popular Japanese RPG and hunting game to explore ecological issues related to the ongoing capitalist exploitation of nature, which are intimately linked to the affective positions of the players. This singular relationship is punctuated by questions about the ontology of the creatures that inhabit the world, their language and communication style, and the system of representation that informs their appearance and behavior. Part documentary, part visual poem, and part conceptual walk-through, The Other Monster was produced using in-game assets, environments, and 3D images generated by an application. From the Anjanath to the Deviljho and the Pukei-Pukei, from the director’s point of view to the players’ experiences with Serid and Unbot, accompanied by their palicos, the monster becomes a metaphor for Otherness: a tool to question one’s relationship to the Other and to the world as a whole.

French artist Alix Desaubliaux and has been an active member of the Vivarium workshop since January 2021. In addition to her artistic practice, she explores performative and experimental formats via online encounters with the collective 3G, featuring Annie Abrahams, Pascale Barret, and Alice Lenay. She is also involved with the research group WMAN, comprising six artists and curators working with video games. Desaubliaux teaches in several art schools including ENSAD Nancy, ESACM Clermont-Ferrand, ENSBA Lyon, ESAM Caen, ESBAN Nîmes, where she organizes workshops, interventions, conferences, and seminars. Her work has been presented in several exhibitions, events, and festivals including Jeune Création Fair in 2015 at the Thaddaeus Ropac gallery; Digital Arts Biennial at the Cité Internationale des Arts, Domaine Pommery; Ars Electronica Festival in Linz, Austria; Mécènes du Sud Montpellier-Sète and Glassbox, among others. Desaubliaux lives and works in Rennes.

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EVENT: CHRISTIAN WRIGHT (OCTOBER 14-27 2022, ONLINE)

SON

digital video/machinima (1920 x 1080), colour, sound, 14’ 59”, 2016, United Kingdom

Created by Christian Wright

Christian Wright reframes painting and cinema through the medium of the video game. Inspired by Caspar David Friedrich’s landscapes and by the extended duration of slow cinema, the artist references historical events and religious themes, but also fictional narratives, sagas and myths of the near future, introducing an expanded narrative that defies easy categorizations. Part of a trilogy, Son investigates the spiritual through the technical, using the notion of ritual as a point of departure. By emphasizing the in-between, the interstitial, and the liminal, the work transforms inactivity into revelation, emptiness into wholeness.

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.

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EVENT: BABAK AHTESHAMIPOUR (SEPTEMBER 16 - SEPTEMBER 29 2022, ONLINE)

POST-CODED THOUGHTS ON THE NEVER-UPCOMING FORESHADOWED LI(F)E

digital video/machinima (1920 x 1080), color, sound, 8’ 54”, 2021, Iran/Greece

Created by Babak Ahteshamipour

Post-coded Thoughts on the Never-upcoming Foreshadowed Li(f)e is a machinima created with The Sims. In this post-apocalyptic narrative, human beings suddenly vanish, leaving behind all their digital spawns: A.I., avatars, algorithms, and programs. Faced with their own risk of extinction, these non-human entities acquire agency and embark into an existential journey to find meaning in an otherwise empty life. The main character is Babak Ahteshamipour’s alter ego, who is reproducing the sheer banality of RL (real life) activities in an environment mirroring his “real”, concrete space, having imported some of his paintings, few custom 3D models from other video games that are depicted in the paintings, musical improvisations with electric guitar and piano, and a text visualizing the sim-avatar’s thoughts.

Babak Ahteshamipour’s practice is based on the collision of the virtual vs actual, aimed at correlating various topics that are not directly connected at first glance from cyberspace to ecology and politics to identity exploring them via MMORPGs/video games, social media and online integrating themes of co-existence and simultaneity in response to the futuristic anthropocentric urge of technocracy to focus on posthumanism. He has exhibited and performed at Centre Pompidou (Paris, France), New Art City (online), The Wrong (online), Sub Rosa space (Athens, Greece), ERGO Collective (Athens, Greece), arebyte (online), Biquini Wax ESP (Mexico City, Mexico), Experimental Sound Studio (Chicago, Illinois) and elsewhere. He has released music on the independent cassette label Industrial Coast and his music has been played on radio stations such as Noods Radio (Bristol, U.K.), Radio Raheem (Milan, Italy), Fade Radio (Athens, Greece) and Radio alHara. Originally from Iran, Ahteshamipour lives and works in Athens, Greece.

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EVENT: GINA HARA (SEPTEMBER 2 - SEPTEMBER 15 2022, ONLINE)

VALLEY

digital video/machinima (1280 x 720), color, sound, 7’ 06”, Hungary/Canada

Created by Gina Hara

Inspired by the rise of artificial intelligence (AI) software in mental health contexts, Gina Hara uses the world of Minecraft as a backdrop for a series of exchanges with an AI-powered chatbot, called Robin, developed specifically for the project. Both the process and the resulting narrative are documented in this short machinima.

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. Hara lives in Montreal, where she works as Creative Director of the Technoculture, Art and Games Research Centre.

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EVENT: ZUZA BANASIŃSKA (AUGUST 19 - SEPTEMBER 1 2022, ONLINE)

ROAD OF FEELINGS

digital video (1920x1080), color, sound, 8’18”, 2022, Poland

Created by Zuza Banasińska

A teenage girl’s room. When she ingests a handful of pills, it start to grow. Normally, as she works out, 1,2,3... 1,2,3... 1,2,3... her muscles can carry stones. Now, they are literally carried. The room walks with her as she touches the ground. In the rhythm of the workout, the walls open up and start chewing the world. Road of Feelings is a video animation created with the Unity 3D engine as part of the artistic collective Ellen Muscle’s LARP (Live Action Role Playing). The scenario was based on a queer-feminist narrative, set in a world where extreme muscle growth is encouraged, especially for teenage girls. Every girl has to take pills that enhance body musculature. Some teens begin to overdose, shortly discovering that the phenomenon enables them to produce hybridized connections. Those hybridizations happen through the muscles themselves. Teens start building and experiencing global networks between things and beings.

Zuza Banasińska (b. 1994) is an audio-visual artist making video-based environments. In her works, virtual and real elements are hybridized beyond distinction in an effort to move from representation towards affective mapping. She studied at the Academy of Fine Arts in Cracow, Universität der Künste in Berlin, and Sandberg Instituut in Amsterdam. In 2020, she won first prize in the Polish Experimental section at Short Waves in Poznań and On. Art in Wrocław. Her works have been shown at the U-Jazdowski CCA in Warsaw, Dům Umění Mesta Brna in Czech Republic and Blindside in Melbourne. She lives and works in Amsterdam.

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