conceptual

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

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. 



EVENT: STEFAN PANHANS AND ANDREA WINKLER (JANUARY 5 - 18 2024, ONLINE)

Freeroam À Rebours, Mod#I.1

digital video, color, sound, 16’ 13”, 2016-2017, Germany

Created by Stefan Panhans and Andrea Winkler

Freeroam À Rebours, Mod#I.1 is a 16-minute video work combining experimental film, music video, performance, and contemporary dance which examines the stilted behaviors and motions of avatars controlled by humans in video games. The avatars demonstrate awkward gestures, repetitive motions, and failures to perform actions. Groups of live dancers and actors physically reenact these movements in a series of situations. Their bodies recreate the avatars’ gestures and repetitions. The performers interact with constructed sets and environments that resemble video game aesthetics. The scenes cut rapidly between the choreographed reenactments and footage excerpted from the games, literally juxtaposing the human and the post-human.

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.



ARTICLE: THE ART OF THE SUBVERSIVE MOD

VRAL is currently showcasing Chris Kerich’s latest project Three Impossible Worlds. To accompany the exhibition, we are discussing several artworks that comprise his oeuvre. Today, we examine his conceptual mod GamePyg’s Face and Body Overhaul.

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Produced in 2021, GamePyg’s Face and Body Overhaul is a conceptual art project by Kerich that employs fictional mod listings and images to critically explore the entitlement, attitude, and control manifest in video game modding cultures. It represents both a continuation of and departure from Kerich’s previous game-based art.

Like earlier works, GamePyg interrogates the ideologies and assumptions embedded in gaming environments. Here the focus falls on modding communities and the gendered politics of editing female bodies and sexuality in games like The Witcher 3. Kerich fabricates an extreme future scenario involving AI-generated mod content to unpack player entitlement and anxieties around control.

However, unlike more abrasive works like Piles, GamePyg adopts an oblique, indirect approach using fictional texts and images. The project was initially posted on the popular modding site Nexus Mods posing as a real mod to engage that community. This can be seen as a more subtle, injection-based artistic intervention into a specific subculture compared to Kerich’s more disruptive previous pieces.

Certain themes carry over from earlier projects. For example, GamePyg continues Kerich’s interest in making visible the hidden values and meaning-making systems encoded in games, which is a stated goal of works like Three Impossible Worlds as well as Dynamic Kinetic Sculptures. The fictional mod explores how modding extends player assumptions about control, “ownership” and access to predominantly female bodies. And it makes use of fictional scenarios and imagery to probe the implications of emerging technologies like AI on gaming and gender representation.

At the same time, GamePyg distinguishes itself by targeting a specific sub-culture rather than gaming writ large…

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Matteo Bittanti

Works cited

Chris Kerich

GamePyg’s Face and Body Overhaul, mod, 2021

The mod can be downloaded from this URL

A full documentation of the project and the development process is available here

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