avant-garde

MMF MMXXIV: STEFAN PANHANS AND ANDREA WINKLER

We are excited to feature Stefan Panhans and Andrea Winkler’s »If You Tell Me When Your Birthday Is« (Machinima version) at the 2024 edition of the Milan Machinima Festival.

Stefan Panhans and Andrea Winkler’s »If You Tell Me When Your Birthday Is« (Machinima version) merges 3D scanning, CGI, avatars, and motion capture with dialogue reflecting AI-driven communication, all set in a vibrantly constructed virtual world. This absurdist mini-drama, divided into three segments, employs real-time graphics to navigate through surreal landscapes - from a BMX course cluttered with office chairs to an otherworldly forest filled with giant pills. The narrative follows two characters wandering fantastical settings, their dialogue laden with misinterpretations and emotional depth, driven by digital patterns and AI mimesis. These avatars, combining 3D models with the actors’ facial scans, move through a series of visually striking, absurd environments that blur the lines between the digital and the physical. Produced during a fellowship at the Academy of Theatre and Digitality in Dortmund, the film critically examines the intricacies of communication with artificial intelligences that saturate modern life. It intentionally highlights the digital-analog conflict and the charming flaws of integrating these realms, rejecting seamless integration for a portrayal filled with comedic and eerie inaccuracies. Through this, »If You Tell Me When Your Birthday Is« (Machinima version) not only entertains but also probes the complexities of our increasingly digital existence.

Stefan Panhans and Andrea Winkler explore contemporary media and its effects on the mind and body through video, photography, installation, and text. Panhans (born in Hattingen, Germany) undertakes a mental archaeology of hyper mediatization and digitalization, examining their influence on the mind and power relations in society. His work also engages with racism, celebrity worship, stereotypes, and diversity. He studied at Hochschule für Bildende Künste Hamburg. Winkler (born in Fällanden, Zurich, Switzerland) examines similar themes through sculpture, video, and installation. She studied at Slade School of Fine Art in London under John Hilliard and Bruce McLean, after completing a degree in Visual Communication at Hochschule für Bildende Künste Hamburg under Wolfgang Tillmans and Gisela Bullacher. Together, the duo create interdisciplinary works that critically investigate contemporary media culture and human-technology interactions through experimental aesthetics. Their collaborations take the form of video, performance, and installation. Their 2016 video, À Rebours. Mod#1.I, was recently featured on VRAL.

Read more about the 7th edition of the Milan Machinima Festival

MMF MMXXIV: THOMAS HAWRANKE

We are delighted to present Thomas Hawranke’s Play As Animals at the upcoming Milan Machinima Festival in a new format.

Originally coiceived as a two-channel found footage installation exploring the nuanced existence of animals in the virtual realm of Grand Theft Auto V, Play as Animals is presented as a single-channel video within the context of MMF MMXXIV. This work artfully assembles YouTube clips, video sequences, and sound fragments into a compelling visual narrative, highlighting the often-overlooked animal perspectives within a digital world primarily shaped by human stories. Hawranke examines the portrayal of these virtual beings, reflecting on human stereotypes and addressing the game-engineered discrimination they face. By stepping into the roles of these non-human characters, players are invited to view the game’s world through a fresh lens, challenging established norms and inviting a reevaluation of their interaction with the virtual environment. Indirectly, Hawranke asks the viewers: What insights emerge from exploring a trailer park on all fours, or experiencing the quietude of farm life? How does navigating the urban jungle as a pack alter one’s perception of the city? Does a fin's playful breach of water’s surface convey deeper meanings, and can one truly play with mice while sporting paws?

Born in 1977 in Bergisch Gladbach, Germany, Thomas Hawranke is a media artist and researcher whose practice investigates the influence of technology on society and the impact of computational logic onto human-animal-machine relationships. In his eclectic interventions, Hawranke operates at the intersection of performance and video art: a central concern of his is bringing to the surface the ideologies that inform everyday life. Hawranke graduated in Media Art at the Academy of Media Arts Cologne and received a PhD from the Bauhaus-University in Weimar, Germany, with a dissertation on the modification of video games, also known as modding, as a method for artistic research. Since 2005, he has been a member of susigames, an independent art label founded in 2003 that investigates alternative gaming’s approaches, and he is the co-founder of the Paidia Institute in Cologne. His works have been presented at several exhibitions and festivals, including the zkm_gameplay in Karlsruhe and the RENCONTRES INTERNATIONALES PARIS/BERLIN. Hawranke lives and works in Cologne, Germany. His recent collaboration with Lasse Sherfigg, Colossal Cave Adventure - The Movie, was featured on VRAL. 

Read more about the 7th edition of the Milan Machinima Festival

MMF MMXXIV: ADONIS ARCHONTIDES

We are elated to introduce Adonis Archontides’s Ya gotta wob’ere! Ya gotta wob’ere! (Don't give up! Keep trying!) at the 2024 edition of the Milan Machinima Festival.

Ya gotta wob‘ere! Ya gotta wob’ere! (Don’t give up! Keep trying!) (2019) by Adonis Archontides is the third installment of a trilogy developed with/in The Sims 4 between 2018 and 2020, alongside Za woka genava (I think you are hot) (2019) and Sulsul! Plerg Majah Bliff? (Hello! Can I do something else please?) (2018). In all of these works, Archontides crafts challenging scenarios for Non-Player Characters (NPCs), exploring the challenges of our increasingly digital existence. Echoing Angela Washko’s seminal Free Will Mode, this work prompts reflection on control and chaos, agency and surveillance. In her essay titled “When our reflections/avatars die, do they go to heaven?”, Eria Dapola described Adonis’ performance as evocative of a world filled with silent but brutal conflicts, with the artist cast as a non-traditional hero navigating through passive-aggressive violence. The video work highlights the dynamic between the artist and avatar, showcasing a relentless survival effort in a confined, yet transparent space. Additionally, curator Chloe Stavrou suggests that Adonis (Sim) embodies a struggle of futile resistance against the game’s implacable algorithmic logic, culminating in inevitable failure followed by virtual resurrection. What is indisputable is that this repetitive cycle interrogates the concept of autonomy within digital spaces. A Sim running on a treadmill to their demise, compelled to repeat the action over and over, without any meaningful goal or higher purpose, is a poignant metaphor for life in the 21st century.

Adonis Archontides, a multidisciplinary artist with a background in Illustration & Visual Media from the University of the Arts London, creates works that are both satirical and introspective. His art delves into identity formation as a deliberate or unconscious act and explores the blur between fiction, reality, and simulation. His research includes an exploration of his namesake, Adonis, the ancient Greek deity of vegetation and desire, examining how interpretations of myths evolve over time. An enthusiastic gamer, Archontides sees significant artistic value in video games, often incorporating them into his practice. Recently, he has embarked on a collaboration with his own avatar in The Sims 4, weaving together Joseph Campbell’s concept of the hero’s journey and the artist’s career path into an episodic narrative. Archontides is based in Limassol, Cyprus, where he continues to live and work. His work Adonis and the Lockdown Tactics was featured in the 2021 edition of the Milan Machinima Festival. 

Read more about the 7th edition of the Milan Machinima Festival

MMF MMXXIV: BRAM RUITER

We are delighted to showcase the remastered, previously unreleased Infinite Skies by Bram Ruiter at the upcoming Milan Machinima Festival.

Infinite Skies, a machinima created by Bram Ruiter and Martin Gerrits during their film school years, explores themes of grief and purgatory. Crafted in the attic of Gerrits’s parents’ home in 2011, this project represents an early, bold foray into complex subjects by the creators, then just 22 years old. Initially viewed by Ruiter as overly edgy, he has since come to recognize its nuanced depth upon revisitation. Echoing the thematic and aesthetic qualities of Ruiter’s later work, Endless Sea, this predecessor inadvertently suggested a trilogy that remained incomplete with the unrealized Unending Earth. This video work marks an early milestone in Ruiter's journey into digital storytelling, setting its narrative against the expansive, generative landscapes of Grand Theft Auto: San Andreas, and drawing inspiration from Philip Solomon’s game video art. Infinite Skies encapsulates a period of raw experimentation and unbridled creativity in Ruiter’s career. Revisited and remastered in 2024, Ruiter’s early work is now being presented for the first time, showcasing his evolving appreciation for the intricate exploration of complex themes.

Bram Ruiter is an experimental filmmaker based in Zwolle, the Netherlands, who creates collage-like cinematic morphologies that examine themes of creation, contradictions, labor, and the unfinished or incomplete. Fascinated by marginal objects and obsolescent procedures, his work incorporates non-traditional materials and broken aesthetics. Ruiter’s films have screened internationally at festivals including the Viennale, Karlovy Vary, Pesaro Film Fest, Fantastic Fest Austin, A.Maze Berlin, and the Netherlands Film Festival. Ruiter also teaches filmmaking at ArtEZ University of the Arts, both at graduate and undergraduate level. His groundbreaking machinima Perpetual Spawning was awarded the Critics’ Choice Award at the 2019 Milan Machinima Festival and his remastered version of Endless Sea was featured in S04 of VRAL.

Read more about the 7th edition of the Milan Machinima Festival

ARTICLE: HAUNTOLOGICAL OBSESSIONS: ON BRAM RUITER’S PERPETUAL SPAWNING

Bram Ruiter, Perpetual Spawning, digital video, color, sound, 5' 41", The Netherlands, Sound design and mix by Tom ‘Silkersoft’ Schley, made with Grand Theft Auto IV (Rockstar Games, 2013)

“Shot in Grand Theft Auto IV, Perpetual Spawning is an hallucinogenic, delirious take on repetition and reiteration. An obsessive hauntological quality pervades this eerie montage of glitches, while Tom ‘Silkersoft’ Schley’s ominous beats lead the viewer in a downward spiral into modern catacombs”. 

As the 2019 Critics’ Choice Award from the Milan Machinima Festival suggests, Ruiter’s film lingers with viewers through its hypnotic sense of unease.

As the Dutch filmmaker explained in a recent interview, Perpetual Spawning emerged organically from his ongoing fascination with Philip Solomon. Specifically, Ruiter was intrigued by how the late American avant-garde filmmaker utilized Grand Theft Auto’s open game architecture to explore the empty yet visually vibrant textures of violence within. Inspired by Solomon’s experimental approach, Ruiter began his own boundary-pushing interventions using available mods to alter GTA IV’s environment and camera positioning. Detaching the first-person camera view to float freely, Ruiter entered one of Liberty City’s subway stations and discovered the game glitching in compelling, unexpected ways. As random non-player character models began perpetually spawning in and out of frame, Ruiter leaned into the surreal effect and structured his footage around the rhythmic arrival of subway trains.

Through this appropriative process aligned with avant-garde figures like Stan Brakhage and the aforementioned Solomon, Ruiter’s machinima interrogation joins a lineage of experimental works utilizing emerging technologies to expose and reshape restrictive media formats. Perpetual Spawning was constructed through Ruiter’s distinctive intuitive approach during a period of confinement and constraint. First introduced in 2018 while temporarily living with parents due to financial limitations, the machinima parallels thematic sensations of entrapment and liminal stasis with its formally inventive passages through a glitched, destabilized gamespace. Though leveraging GTA IV rather than San Andreas – the setting for Ruiter’s 2015 work Endless Sea –, both poetic non-narrative pieces emerge from the artist’s urge to discover beauty and cathartic release through “screwing around” with commercial game assets in abnormal ways.

So, what does Ruiter’s tinkering achieve?

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Matteo Bittanti

Works cited 

Bram Ruiter, Perpetual Spawning, digital video, color, sound, 5’ 41”, The Netherlands, Sound design and mix by Tom “Silkersoft” Schley, made with Grand Theft Auto IV (Rockstar Games, 2013)

Bram Ruiter, Endless Sea, digital video, color, sound, 6’ 59”, 2015 (2023), The Netherlands, made with Grand Theft Auto San Andreas (Rockstar Games, 2004)

Perpetual Spawning is officially distributed by Collectif Jeune Cinema

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ARTICLE: A CLOSER LOOK AT STEFAN PANHANS AND ANDREA WINKLER’S FREEROAM À REBOURS, MOD#I.1. PART THREE

Japanese TikToker Natuecoco in her signature cat ears and wig.Courtesy of Natuecoco

Our 2024 VRAL program opened by spotlighting Stefan Panhans and Andrea Winkler’s Freeroam À Rebours, Mod#I.1. This 16-minute experimental video from 2016-2017, a “machinima sui generis”, warrants extended analysis in its own right and we highlighted key themes in our extended conversation with the artists. But since contextualizing unique works within broader cultural spheres often proves illuminating, we will situate Freeroam À Rebours within surrounding phenomena that inspire comparative examination and share (perceived) resonances.

Part one is available here

Part two is available here

As you may know, the phenomenon of NPC (Non-Player Character) streaming was pioneered by the Japanese performer Natuecoco, a content creator known for her distinctive cat ears and colorful wigs, who embarked on an experimental journey in October 2021. In many ways, she set a standard, introducing a template that others followed almost verbatim. Her livestreams, characterized by the obsessive repetition of catchphrases in Japanese and Korean — along with precise, almost robotic movements — captivated a global audience. Her daily performances, lasting up to an hour and a half, would see a surge of interaction as viewers sent tokens to elicit specific responses.

Her online performances, however, began earlier. Also known within the US context as the “Ohio Queen” or “Eringi”, Natuecoco initially established her online presence on Twitch in 2019. Over three years, she amassed over 12,600 followers, though she retired from Twitch streaming in February 2022. Her social media trajectory, marked by an Instagram debut in December 2019 and a TikTok presence from March 2020, has showcased her cosplay selfies and self-portraits, alongside promoting her Twitch activities. However it is herTikTok content that gained significant traction, with one video achieving over 1 million plays in December 2021. In February 2022, Natuecoco shifted her focus to TikTok Live. Collaborating with fellow TikToker Satoyu0704, also known as the “Ohio Final Boss”, she engaged audiences in NPC-like performances, gaining notable popularity. Their partnership became a hallmark in Japanese meme circles on TikTok, with their collaborative content often going viral. According to Know Your Meme, Satoyu0704’s nickname “Ohio Final Boss” emerged due to his catchphrase “Ohayo,” Ohio memes on TikTok, and the broader “Final Boss” trend. This led to Natuecoco being dubbed the “Ohio Queen” as part of their collaborative lore (1).

Natuecoco’s approach to NPC streaming is both innovative and intriguing and remains baffling and hypnotic even today. She adopted the persona of a video game NPC, known for their predictable behavior and repetitive actions. However, Natuecoco added a unique twist, combining her routine with a more nuanced and puzzling performance. The eerie resemblance of her movements to a character in a video game led viewers to refer to her as the “original AI queen”, as Yooni Han wrote in a widely read profile piece for Business Insider in 2023.

The major inspiration of Natuecoco’s ongoing performance is cosplay, which scholars like Frenchy Lunning (2) describe as a multilayered, complex practice comprisin four main dimensions…

(continues)

Matteo Bittanti

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ARTICLE: A CLOSER LOOK AT STEFAN PANHANS AND ANDREA WINKLER’S FREEROAM À REBOURS, MOD#I.1. PART TWO

Cherry Crush ASMR

Our 2024 VRAL program opened by spotlighting Stefan Panhans and Andrea Winkler’s Freeroam À Rebours, Mod#I.1. This 16-minute experimental video from 2016-2017, a “machinima sui generis”, warrants extended analysis in its own right and we highlighted key themes in our extended conversation with the artists. But since contextualizing unique works within broader cultural spheres often proves illuminating, we will situate Freeroam À Rebours within surrounding phenomena that inspire comparative examination and share (perceived) resonances.

In our previous article, we compared PinkyDoll’s TikTok NPC streaming to Stefan Panhans and Andrea Winkler’s 2016-2017 video artwork Freeroam À Rebours – two cultural artifacts involving video game character behavior reenactment with vastly different aesthetics and framing, not to mention intent.

We characterized PinkyDoll as an ongoing sexualized doll performance on social media pursuing viral fame and profit. In contrast, Freeroam À Rebours operates as avant-garde art aiming to critically analyze media culture and deconstruct simulations. PinkyDoll loosely borrows from Grand Theft Auto iconic imagery while Freeroam À Rebours closely recontextualizes specific Grand Theft Auto V mechanics. Lastly, PinkyDoll represents viral internet trends capitalizing on sexual tropes for views and money whereas Freeroam À Rebours pushes experimental boundaries to interrogate human-machine interaction.

We applied Sigmund Freud’s theory of the uncanny to decode both cultural phenomena, noting shared qualities of repetition and distorted familiarity. Yet clear divergences emerged on critical perspectives. For instance, Freeroam À Rebours is explicitly framed as a meditation on experimentation, failure aesthetics, and broken simulations. We noticed how Freeroam À Rebours lacks any direct, explicit reference to the very notion of viral media, social platforms, and attention economics and it is extraneous to hypersexualization and objectification that connotes Pinkydoll’s performances.

Expanding our analysis, we now relate Freeroam À Rebours to adjacent TikTok NPC streaming phenomena and the wider ascent of sexualized ASMR/cosplay performances. These intimate online practices often present fantasized personas, leveraging scalable platforms, gamified interactions, and participatory culture…

(continues)

Matteo Bittanti

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EVENT: BRAM RUITER (JANUARY 19 - FEBRUARY 1 2024, ONLINE)

Endless Sea

digital video, color, sound, 6’ 59”, 2015 (2023), The Netherlands

Created by Bram Ruiter

Bram Ruiter’s experimental 2015 work Endless Sea was originally shot with/in a modified version of Grand Theft Auto: San Andreas (Rockstar Games, 2004). Yet rather than depicting the crime simulations and violence the game was originally designed for, Ruiter harnesses expanded weather and free camera tools to craft an oneiric aesthetic experience outside gameplay norms. Through prismatic neon haze and perpetual storms visualized with heightened cinematic focus, the 6-minute conceptual work inhabits an ambivalent space between the game’s assumed freedoms and underlying restrictions. As the perspective drifts, glides, pursues unknown figures through the deserted streets, a disquieting sense of surveillance, pursuit and entrapment permeates the mood. Repeated cryptic references to the endless sea itself seems to signal the infinite confines of San Andreas, though whether the despairing urge to break free springs from the player or the lone avatar remains ambiguous. Ultimately Ruiter undermines the promised openness of Rockstar Games’ sandbox architecture by exposing its boundaries through tonal manipulation. Endless Sea is presented on VRAL in a never-seen-before, 2023 remastered edition.

Bram Ruiter is an experimental filmmaker based in Zwolle, the Netherlands, who creates collage-like cinematic morphologies that examine themes of creation, contradictions, labor, and the unfinished or incomplete. Fascinated by marginal objects and obsolescent procedures, his work incorporates non-traditional materials and broken aesthetics. Ruiter's films have screened internationally at festivals including the Viennale, Karlovy Vary, Pesaro Film Fest, Fantastic Fest Austin, A.Maze Berlin, and the Netherlands Film Festival. Ruiter also teaches filmmaking at ArtEZ University of the Arts, both at graduate and undergraduate level. 



ARTICLE: A CLOSER LOOK AT STEFAN PANHANS AND ANDREA WINKLER’S FREEROAM À REBOURS, MOD#I.1. PART ONE

Pinkydoll, source: The New York Times, 2023

Our 2024 VRAL program opened by spotlighting Stefan Panhans and Andrea Winkler’s Freeroam À Rebours, Mod#I.1. This 16-minute experimental video from 2016-2017, a “machinima sui generis”, warrants extended analysis in its own right and we highlighted key themes in our extended conversation with the artists. But since contextualizing unique works within broader cultural spheres often proves illuminating, we will situate Freeroam À Rebours within surrounding phenomena that inspire comparative examination and share (perceived) resonances. We begin our critical discussion by provocatively juxtaposing Freeroam À Rebours, Mod#I.1 with Pinkydoll’s performances on TikTok. This surprising collision between avant-garde video art and sexualized social media spectacle may first appear discordant. Yet, we believe that exploring affinities and divergences could uncover deeper truths. What crosstalk might emerge by contrasting these works’ differing aims, aesthetics and receptions as they meet in the wider landscape of contemporary media culture? A word of advice: keep an open mind.

One of 2023’s most discussed TikTok “phenomena” blurred the lines between the real and the simulated. The so-called NPC streaming genre features content creators endlessly repeating canned gestures, catchphrases, and stilted movements in response to viewers’ “gifts” that cue different reactions. They embody non-player video game characters, predictable and limited in their responses, as if not quite human or, perhaps, post-human. Viewers are drawn to the surreal, hypnotic spectacle.

To grasp the allure of NPC streaming, it is useful to spotlight TikTok’s both participatory affordinaces and business model enabling this phenomenon. The platform allows direct viewer engagement through digital “gifts”: that is, users pay performers to enact repetitive reactions that evoke programmable game characters. This transaction triggers an unconventional power dynamic: viewers request machine-like responses from creators roleplaying as robotic entities of narrow capability. The performers dutifully oblige, echoing simulated automatons, reducing their agency in a subtly objectifying, sexualized manner.

Yet, for all its resonances with command-control dynamics, this parasocial relationship remains grounded in consent and direct remuneration. In other words, the performers voluntarily adopt constrained, submissive personas because they provide lucrative opportunities. Audiences understand these limits as conditions of a (literally and metaphorically) limited exchange that produces puzzling visual pleasures.

Consider the case of Pinkydoll, the online persona of Canadian content creator Fedha Sinon, who gained viral popularity on TikTok in the summer 2023 for her NPC livestreams…

(continues)

Matteo Bittanti

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ARTICLE: ADRIFT IN THE UNCANNY VALLEY

VRAL is currently exhibiting Aleksandar Radan’s This water giver back no Images. To provide context to this remarkable work, we are discussing the Serbian-German artist’ oeuvre. Today we take a closer look at In Between identities.

With his groundbreaking machinima In between identities (2015) and the subsequent video installation This water gives back no Images (2017), Berlin-based filmmaker Aleksandar Radan established himself in the mid-2010s as a rising talent probing the porous boundaries between concrete and virtual spaces. Appropriating assets from blockbuster games like Grand Theft Auto V, Radan constructs eerie, liminal worlds where meaning frays, and questions of identity become as glitchy as the discordant landscapes he frames.

Originally presented in April 2020 as VRAL #2, In between identities sees Radan hijack GTA V, rewriting portions of code through modding to direct lonely avatars stripped of context, narrative, and purpose. Bereft of missions, these figures wander a murky, humid, deserted city, their awkward movements and apparent disorientation at odds with the usual bombastic pace of the “conventional” gameplay. Dressed incongruously in bathing suits or fur coats, slicing cucumbers over their eyes, the mute characters perform uncanny rituals before mirrors and displays. Repeated motifs like photographs and screens highlight themes of fragmented selfhood and surveillance. Radan’s fixed camera angles hold uncomfortably long on incidents of mundane absurdity as his non-player characters break scripted behaviors. Static shots are interrupted by the camera’s jerky movements as the artist is filming the computer monitor where the action is unfolding, zooming in and out abruptly, rather than recording the game footage via a dedicated card. The removal of soundtracks enhances the sensation of drifting outside reality.

This early experiment crystallized Radan’s impulse to short-circuit gaming conventions via artistic intervention…

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Matteo Bittanti

Works cited

Aleksandar Radan

In between identities, digital video, color, sound, 8’ 50”, 2015, Germany

This water gives back no Images, 3-channel video installation, 6’ 12”, loop, 2017, Germany; presented on VRAL as a single-channel digital video

All images courtesy of the Artist

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