MMF MMXXIII UPDATE: A CHAT WITH BEN NICHOLSON

We are delighted to share an interview with Ben Nicholson, the author of the tonic of battersea park which will be screened at the Interactive Museum of Cinema, Milan, Italy on March 25 2023 as part of the MMF MMXXIII in the program Neither Intelligent, Nor Artificial.

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Ben Nicholson’s the tonic of battersea park is a poetic machinima that employs a procedural generated environment to evoke the constructed aura of “nature”. Using the video game Proteus and the writing of Henry David Thoreau, Nicholson creates a unique visual and auditory experience. At the heart of the machinima is the concept of domesticated nature. The appropriation of game’s procedural generated environment allows Nicholson to create a sense of lo-fi, pixellated beauty. The use of Thoreau’s words though the filter of ChatGPT adds another layer of depth (and irony) to this apparently simple machinima, imbuing it with an algorithmically generated quality. In the tradition of the avant-garde, the tonic of battersea parkchallenges traditional notions of art and pushes the boundaries of what is possible with machinima.

Ben Nicholson is a film writer, curator, and moderator. His writing has appeared in publications such as Sight & Sound, The Guardian, and Hyperallergic. Ben is the chief shorts reviewer for The Film Verdict and the founder of ALT/KINO, a project that showcases alternative voices and visions particularly in the realm of experimental film. He is also the artistic director of the Alpha Film Festival, which had its first edition in March 2023. Ben has curated programs for festivals such as Sheffield Doc/Fest and Open City Documentary Festival, and moderated events for the Barbican Centre, ICA, and more. He holds a Master of the Arts in Film and Screen Media from Birkbeck College and has served on juries at the Go Short Film Festival and the Arab Cinema Center’s Critics’ Awards.

Matteo Bittanti: In the realm of contemporary video art and experimental cinema, machinima has emerged as a distinctive genre that challenges traditional notions of filmic creation. Can you expound upon your interpretation of this genre, and where you locate its place within the audiovisual landscape? Additionally, I’d love to hear about your initial encounter with machinima, and how it has influenced your artistic practice.

Ben Nicholson: I think my first encounter with machinima came back in 2018. I don’t recall the precise piece of work I came across first, but I do recall going on voyage of discovery while researching a piece I was writing on smart cities, and I was thinking about digital renderings of landscapes. I was trying to pull together my thoughts on certain moments in Theo Anthony’s essay documentary Rat Film and was reading Michael Crowe’s An Attempt At Exhausting A Place in GTA Online. Somewhere in amongst that, a friend recommended Total Refusal’s Operation Jane Walk and Jonathan Vinel’s Martin Cries. I never looked back and, I think, Martin Cries remains the machinima I cherish the most.

How I locate it and how it has influenced me are perhaps a little more nebulous to define, but I’ll try. I think I am someone that has been fascinated for some time in the potential of the compilation film, the video essay or, more generally, artworks made using found materials. Some of my favourite filmmakers of recent times – Peggy Ahwesh, Stephen Broomer, Bill Morrison, Soda_Jerk, Jean-Gabriel Périot, Lewis Klahr, Catherine Grant – have excelled in appropriating and adapting to fascinating effect. For me, the machinima I adore tends to often feel like something of an extension of that kind of practice. It is perhaps a little more malleable than existing video footage, in certain circumstances, but there is a similar tension in the way these films draw out their own narratives and meanings through liberated imagery – often in a way that can feel challenging to, or radically at odds with, the material’s original purpose. There are many other examples where machinima allows for a glorious virtual sandbox, but the found footage element appeals most to me.

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Works cited

Ben Nicholson

the tonic of battersea park

digital video/machinima, color, sound, 2’ 37”, 2023, England

Made with Proteus (Ed Key, David Kanaga, 2013) and ChatGPT (OpenAI, 2022

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ARTICLE: A CLOSER LOOK AT GINA HARA'S VALLEY

YES, THE FUTURE DOES SOUND LIKE A CHATBOT

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Exclusively featured on VRAL until September 15 2022, Gina Hara’s latest project Valley was originally developed during a three month artist residency at Ada X (October-December 2021) under a different title. Originally founded in 1996 as Studio XX, Ada X (2020-) is a bilingual feminist artist-run center located in Montréal, Canada committed to exploration, creation, and critical reflection in media arts and digital culture. Its main goals are making accessible, demystifying, equipping, questioning, and creating art and culture to contribute to the development of a digital democracy. Ada X hosts residencies, workshops, discussions, exhibitions, performances, and educational activities. Hara’s residency was supported by Algora Lab, an interdisciplinary academic laboratory that fosters a deliberative ethics of AI and digital innovation and analyzes the societal and political aspects of the emerging algorithmic society. Gina Hara is an artist-filmmaker with a background in new media and video art. Her work focuses on marginalized narratives from feminist and immigrant perspectives, specifically in the context of social media and games culture. Entitled AI the End, the original video - which you can watch here - was officially unveiled on Thursday December 9, 2021.

Gina Hara’s ongoing interest in the proliferation of artificial intelligence assistants offering pseudo mental-health help online piqued during the Covid-19 pandemic, which was marked by social isolation and an unprecedented lack of IRL interactions. Specifically, Hara draws a parallel between video game playing and AI-assisted mental health. Such a comparison is remarkable because it provides a possible explanation for the rise of digital gaming as neoliberalism became the world’s dominant ideology: taken to its extreme yet logical consequences, we may suggest that there’s a direct connection between mental disorders and video games. The more psychologically unstable we become due to the conditions of the environments we live in, the more we play Minecraft and the likes. Which is to say: the more unstable, precarious, broken, and unpredictable the World becomes, the stronger the need to exert some kind of control and agency over another kind of world, a simulated world in which we are cast as a powerful demiurge. As the Neoliberalism project succeeded in excising democracy from politics, disenfranchising the masses and replacing it with the so-called “freedom to choose” which pair of sneakers you can buy on Amazon, video games introduced a form of pseudo participation through interactivity. TED Talk “gurus” and Silicon Valley’s “edgelords” call this phenomenon “democratization”, a word that  like “friend”, “community”, “like” has no real meaning outside of the Big Tech bubble, or rather, has purely transactional implications.

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Matteo Bittanti

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