contemporary art

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.



NEWS: ART IS A GAME NOT EVERYBODY CAN PLAY (LET ALONE WIN)

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VRAL is currently exhibiting Juan Obando’s Pro Revolution Soccer, a modded version of PES celebrating a counter-historical event: a match between Inter Milan and the Zapatista Army of National Liberation soccer team that never took place. Today, we are presenting another example of video game-based art created by hijacking, appropriating, and recontextualizing Konami’s popular soccer game, The Cool Couple’s Emozioni Mondiali (2018-ongoing) through the lens of Sarah Thornton’s notion of subcultural capital. Previous episodes in this series include Miguel Gomes, Marta Azparren, Gweni Llwyd and Owen Davies

Nicolò Benetton and Simone Santilli aka The Cool Couple, are known for their astute artistic interventions which often incorporate video games, as in the case of Flyin’ High (2021), a machinima created with(in) Microsoft Flight Simulator. Emozioni Mondiali (2018-ongoing) skillfully combines the domains of sport, politics, and art. Described as “an expansion kit” for the immensely popular football game Pro Evolution Soccer 2018, the work is an ironic and provocative arena that encourages user, pardon, visitor participation. Specifically, each museum goer is invited to engage in situ with a special edition of Konami’s simulation featuring customized athletes/artists belonging to distinct movements spanning from the Renaissance to the present day. Notably, among these teams are the duo themselves.

Executed with meticulous care and a deep respect for the evoked artists, events, and movements it represents – e.g., the Renaissance, Baroque, Neoclassicism, Romanticism, Impressionism, Futurism 1909, DADA, S.F. Surrealiste, Abstract Expressionism, Fluxus, Pop Art, Conceptual Art 1961, Art Informel, Land Art, Arte Povera, Young British Artists, Dreams and Conflicts – Venice Biennale 2003, Photo-Legends, Post-Internet, Documenta (13) –, Emozioni Mondiali is a mischievous examination of the symbiotic (parasitic?) relationship between art and sport, and vice versa. The work has been exhibited as an interactive installation running the customized iteration of Pro Evolution Soccer 2018, and it is complemented by abstract paintings based on the teams’ jerseys and uniforms patterns.

Emozioni Mondiali is both an exercise in skinning – i.e., the process of altering the visual look of game elements like characters, vehicles, or weapons of a video game without changing their underlying mechanics or gameplay functionality – and extreme customization. As most gamers know, skins are applied as textures, materials, or mesh overlays that give models a new surface look. Creating skins requires graphic design skills and often advanced 3D modeling knowledge to make the assets fit the game’s visual style. Moreover, skinning allows the most skilled players to put their own visual stamp on games in a way that shows off their style, skills, or status in the community and it could be considered an example of what art critic Sarah Thornton calls subcultural capital in her 1995 book Club Cultures, which refers to the social status, knowledge, and cultural competencies that confer prestige within certain subcultures. Subcultural capital can be converted into economic capital: unsurprisingly, the most sought out skin artists often provide their services to other gamers – and artists, why not? – for a price.

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Matteo Bittanti

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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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