performance

ARTICLE: GEORGIE ROXBY SMITH VS. THE MADONNA-WHORE COMPLEX

As VRAL current solo exhibition focuses on Georgie Roxby Smith’s new Blood Paintings series, we aim to illuminate her legacy of confrontational game-based art by examining a pivotal early work, Lara Croft, Domestic Goddess I & II, which re-cast the Tomb Raider heroine as a proto-tradwife in her most challenging mission.

The endlessly looping cries of gaming icon Lara Croft echo incongruously over household chores in Georgie Roxby Smith’s 2013 performance and Second Life intervention, Lara Croft, Domestic Goddess I & II. The female explorer’s torture screams punctuate mundane, uneventful acts like washing and ironing clothes. The superimposition of discordant feminine spheres spotlights the bias still dogging video games’ staunchest female characters today. Despite efforts celebrating Lara Croft’s emotional depth and resolve through various reboots and remakes, her graphic anguish feels all too familiarly pinned to outmoded visions of femininity from the franchises’ past.

Having already probed systemic dangers subtly encoded for female avatars through works like The Fall Girl in 2012, here Smith spotlights the lingering identity tensions constraining Lara Croft. The Tomb Raider icon embodies a discombobulating identity bifurcation: aspiring towards fierce, capable heroism on one hand while still confined as an ornament for the traditionally masculine demographic’s visual greed alone on the other. As Croft’s strained persona splits unevenly between feminist icon and fetishized pin-up, she exemplifies unreconciled contradictions of projecting strength while submitting to the objectifying male gaze. By confronting this demeaning binary — akin to the  dichotomy informing the Madonna-whore complex mapping women into mutually exclusive camps of saintly virtue or debased promiscuity — Smith indicts the media forces that tokenize liberatory gestures yet withhold full multidimensional womanhood under paternalistic pretense…


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Matteo Bittanti

Works cited

George Roxby Smith, Fair Game [Run like a girl], in-game performance, machinima (color, sound, 13’ 56”), 2015.

Georgie Roxby Smith, Lara Croft, Domestic Goddess I & II, Lara Croft death noises from Tomb Raider (2013), 3D model, Second Life intervention, looped continuously for duration.

Georgie Roxby Smith, The Fall Girl, in-game performance and machinima (color, sound, 8’ 07”), 2012.

Peggy Ahwesh, She Puppet, digital video, color, sound, 15’, 2001.

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ARTICLE: GEORGIE ROXBY SMITH AND THE LONELINESS OF THE LONG DISTANCE NPC RUNNER

As VRAL current solo exhibition focuses on Georgie Roxby Smith’s new Blood Paintings series, we aim to illuminate her legacy of confrontational game-based art by examining a pivotal early work, Fair Game [Run Like A Girl]. Our analysis centers on overlapping themes in Smith’s practice of visual confrontation around gaming’s ingrained normalization of violence towards feminine identity and representation...

In her 2015 performance Fair Game [Run Like A Girl], Georgie Roxby Smith hijacks the marginalized female non-playable characters in Grand Theft Auto V, stretching their flight animations into disturbing prey. As her sadistic avatar stalks and toys with these sexualized bots in the streets (and hills!) of Los Santos, their loops of cowering and screaming indict the misogyny hard-coded into this digital Californication. 

Before examining the work, the ominous title warrants exploration. As Emma Griffin explains in her monumental work, “fair game” historically traces back to the hunting fields of 19th century Britain, where it was used to denote legal and ethical parameters around which animals could be hunted during a given season. Anything deemed within the boundaries of “fair game” – open for sporting, capture, or killing – was considered unprotected prey. Already by the late 1800s however, the idiomatic implications had extended more broadly to refer to anything – or for that matter, anyone– that dominant powers or social forces considered appropriate targets for criticism, ridicule, sexualization or attack without fear of consequences or concern over consent. Victim blaming was implicit; in the cultural view, targets labeled “fair game” were themselves presumed to invite trouble or violence due to defiant or nonconforming attitudes, appearances, or behavior.

In choosing Fair Game as the title of her intervention, Smith knowingly evokes the historical associations of marking feminine bodies as vulnerable game ripe for one-sided, unethical hunting by more powerful and forceful antagonists. Her interrogation lays bare gaming ecosystems and cultures enabling the chasing and tormenting of women without consequences under the veneer of play and the pretext of fun. Let’s now concentrate on the second part of the title. The bracketed “run like a girl” also carries insidious coding limitations into culture. The phrase has history mocking supposedly inherent feminine weakness and first surfaced as a comment denouncing “inadequate masculinity”. Specifically, it critiqued women’s alleged lack of power, speed or coordination.. 

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Matteo Bittanti

Works cited

Georgie Roxby Smith, Fair Game [Run like a girl], in-game performance, machinima (color, sound, 13’ 56”), 2015

Georgie Roxby Smith, 99 Problems [WASTED], in-game performance, machinima (color, sound, 4’ 45”), 2014

Georgie Roxby Smith, Blood Paintings, digital video, color, sound, 11’ 06”, 2024

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ARTICLE: GEORGIE ROXBY SMITH, AVATAR MARTYR

VRAL is currently presenting Georgie Roxby Smith’s Blood Paintings as a single channel video. To fully appreciate the significance of this series, we are exploring various artworks in her oeuvre. Our discussion continues with the 2014 in-game performance and machinima 99 Problems [WASTED], in which she lays bare the destructive ideological apparatus turning a woman from playable protagonist to disposable puppet. An apparatus revealed in all its banality through this avatar’s hopelessness before the blasé machinery of suicide.

A scantily clad, blood splattered female avatar takes position underneath a grimy Los Santos overpass, nonchalantly pressing a pistol barrel to her temple. Face impassive, she pulls the trigger without hesitation or emotion. As the crack of the gunshot fades, her body collapses limply to the ground. But the scene soon repeats in a different setting; the nameless woman reappears in different locations of an ersatz Los Angeles, apparently unscathed. She promptly turns the gun on herself once more. And then again. And again. Welcome to Georgie Roxby Smith’s 99 Problems [WASTED].

Rather than embrace the free-roaming escapades and rags-to-riches schemes promised by Rockstar Games, Smith pursues vicarious self-destruction via her avatar in order to critique the game’s normalization of disproportionate feminine victimization and sidelining. Each gunshot shrieks for recognition by game publishers and players alike of women’s ritualized vulnerability, marginalization, misrepresentation, and fleeting relevance in adventures coded around masculine power fantasies and patriarchal prerogatives.

The settings chosen by Smith for her suicide(s) add another layer of meaning through provocative juxtapositions. Her avatar enacts public immolation before storefronts boasting suggestive names such as “Heroin Chic” to “Hole”. Likewise, the protagonist’s ritualized demise unfolds around caricatures of consumerism and vanity, as selfie-snapping tourists remain oblivious next to the bloodshed. A rather explicit ad for “hamburger meat” near a bus stop functions as a background for another death. Boys toys, i.e., signifiers of masculinity, also frame some vignettes, as sports cars and firearms signifying power and control. Through these judiciously chosen environmental factors, Smith further implicates the saturating messages that enable the devaluing of women’s lives and identities across societies both real and virtual. 

The ceaseless repetition produces surprising effects: the initial shock of Smith’s female avatar brutally committing suicide soon gives way among viewers to contrasting feelings ranging from desensitized ennui to warped anticipation…

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Matteo Bittanti

Works cited

George Roxby Smith, 99 Problems [WASTED], in-game performance, machinima (color, sound, 4’ 45”), 2014

Georgie Roxby Smith, Blood Paintings, digital video, color, sound, 11’ 06”, 2024

Brody Condon, Suicide Solution, DVD documentation of in-game performance, 19’, 2004

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ARTICLE: GEORGIE ROXBY SMITH, GLITCH WITCH

VRAL is currently presenting Georgie Roxby Smith’s Blood Paintings as a single channel video. To fully appreciate the significance of this series, we will explore various artworks. Our discussion starts with Smith’s landmark 2012 in-game performance and machinima The Fall Girl.

Like an anxious dancer condemned to endless pirouettes, the female protagonist of Georgie Roxby Smith’s The Fall Girl spins helplessly down a bleak mountain passage in The Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim, contorted by an inadvertent “death glitch.” With her avatar locked in this ceaseless loop of hellish torture, Smith captures extended footage exposing the anguished animation frame-by-frame in its punishing inertia. She isolates this doom loop from surrounding gameplay, forcing viewers to confront imagery typically blinked past and easily forgotten.

Removed from context, this tableaux vivant sui generis betrays the ingrained misogyny encoded subtly into gaming worlds, worlds populated largely by male creators and players enacting adventures through the restrictive lens of a decidedly masculine gaze. Bug or intentional vignette, the isolated scene reduces Skyrim’s expansive questing freedom to the ruthless physics binding female characters: they must ultimately submit to situations, no matter how treacherous, tied to their prescribed femininity. It’s in the game! It’s codified! It is what it is!

In other words, the revolution we witness here is literal, or, rather physical: the female character is spinning on her axis, over and over again. This revolution as continual rotation leads to a revelation. Through this glitch excavation, Smith moves beyond the industry’s celebratory talk of interactivity as freedom, “abdication of authorship”, “co-creation” and “emergent” player stories, pervasive in fandom studies and game studies. Instead, recalling feminist film theory traditions, she confronts gaming technology’s uncanny knack for magnifying the most disturbing drives and assumptions underlying popular culture. Stuck in her deadly spin, The Fall Girl becomes less individual than archetype or trope, a sacrificial testament to the cyclical violence awaiting game heroines straying beyond plastic pedestals into masculine power fantasies.

Even Lara Croft, hailed once as groundbreaking virtual female representation, submitted to famously voyeuristic death scenes accentuating her hyper-sexualized physique rendered vulnerable, as both Miltos Manetas and Peggy Ahwesh remind us…

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Matteo Bittanti

Works cited

Georgie Roxby Smith, The Fall Girl, in-game performance and machinima (color, sound, 8’ 07”), 2012.

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ARTICLE: A CLOSER LOOK AT GEORGIE ROXBY SMITH’S BLOOD PAINTINGS

Georgie Roxby Smith, Blood Paintings, digital video, 2024, still

VRAL is currently showcasing Georgie Roxby Smith’s Blood Paintings series as a single channel machinima. Today we take a closer look at her process to highlight key themes and contextualize her aesthetic choices.

At first glimpse, the lurid black and red canvases of Georgie Roxby Smith’s Blood Paintings betray little of the cold, mechanical violence from whence they emerged. Yet the intra-triptych of videos, prints and photographs accompanying each finished piece document one of the most conceptually daring artistic processes within game art in recent memory, bridging virtual chaos and physical creation.

The genesis occurs not with “traditional” brushes, but with a stolen sedan careening down the endless freeways of Grand Theft Auto V’s sprawling fictional city, Los Santos. Smith ritualistically mows down random pedestrian after pedestrian, indifferent to the piled corpses littering her wake, or rather, using them as a source material. Through an online machinima feed, these virtual “vehicular blood harvests” stream to screens in her corporeal studio. Eyes locked on the carnage, the vampiric artist enacts swift gestural translations of each fresh victim into pigment. Ram, observe, render, repeat: a piece takes shape with each new mark responding to lives callously extinguished in a doom loop of hit-and-hit-and-hit-and-drag.

When the gameplay session concludes, having claimed several bystanders sacrificially for the sake of her work, Smith reviews the tapes from alternate camera angles. She zooms in on singular moments of compressed brutality, photoshopping images together with her physical canvas snapshots. These digital/physical hybrids form the third component in presenting each unique Blood Painting. Beside them, innocuous “art selfies” feature the artist clutching her macabre works with almost maternal pride rather than horror at their genesis.

These self congratulatory portraits seem jarringly incongruous beside the disturbing machinima footage of pedestrian carnage used to inspire…

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Matteo Bittanti

Works cited

Georgie Roxby Smith

Blood Paintings

digital video, color, sound, 11’ 06”, 2024, Australia

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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: JOHN CHAMBERLAIN LIVES ON

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 series Dynamic Kinetic Sculptures.

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Like the previously discussed Piles(2018), Dynamic Kinetic Sculptures (2017) utilizes the mechanics of video games in unconventional ways in order to produce glitch art and reveal the underlying systems and hidden ideologies. However, whereas Piles employed violence and repetition to provoke discomfort, Keric’s previous work Dynamic Kinetic Sculptures taps into the joyful anarchy and broken physics of glitch art.

In this series, Kerich builds impossible vehicular constructions using the editor in the soft-body physics driving simulator BeamNG.drive. Vehicles are stacked, fused, and contorted into chaotic sculptures that burst into flames or cause extreme glitching of the physics engine when simulated. According to the artist, this project was inspired by the vernacular YouTube series Car Boys, in which the hosts push BeamNG to its limits to produce an absurdist, often hilarious spectacle.

BeamNG.drive is notable for its advanced soft-body physics simulation which allows vehicles to crumple, deform, and come apart in dynamic ways during crashes. Both Piles and Dynamic Kinetic Sculptures  use exploitation of game systems against their intended purpose in order to surface hidden logics, biases and prerogatives. But whereas the former is painstakingly structured and demanding of both artist and viewer in terms of duration and access (it was originally livestreamed on Twitch for 22 hours), Dynamic Kinetic Sculptures embraces playful serendipity, shorter length, and post facto consumption. It follows in a lineage of glitch art that finds meaning in rupturing systems through technical abuse rather than programmatic critique.

And while Piles implicates masculinity and power relations in its repetitive symbolic violence, Dynamic Kinetic Sculptures has no such explicit agenda beyond visible chaos. In fact, the Car Boys inspiration anchors it firmly in the juvenile but often creative energy of tinkering that many first experience in childhood, usually coded ‘male’: like video games, automobiles are connoted as “boys’ toys”, that is, tools and technologies that promote masculine ideals of competition, power, status, domination, and aggression through play, often emphasizing technical mastery and…

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Matteo Bittanti

Works cited

Chris Kerich

Digital Kinetic Sculptures

digital video/machinima, color, sound, various length, 2017, United States.

digital images, 2017, United States.

All images and videos courtesy of the Artist.

Read more about Chamberlain’s sculptures.

Read more about Brenton Alexander Smith.

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ARTICLE: FOLDERS FULL OF BODIES

VRAL is currently showcasing Chris Kerich’s latest project Three Impossible Worlds. To accompany the exhibition, we’ll be discussing several artworks that comprise his oeuvre. Today, we examine his monumental project Piles (2018).

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Piles is a video art project that explores the symbolic and political dimensions of piling up dead or unconscious bodies in video games. Between 2020-2021, the artist, Chris Kerich, livestreamed over 22 hours of gameplay footage on Twitch of him creating piles of bodies across seven different video games. His goal was to turn an uncritical and common practice in gaming communities into a critical interrogation of how games incorporate concepts of life, death, and bodies into their design.

The games selected represent a mix of big-budget productions titles like Hitman, independent games like Viscera Cleanup Detail (which we presented within the context of the 2021 Milan Machinima Festival in a 80 minute cut), and a game creation platform, Tabletop Simulator. This range allows for different perspectives on the theme. The piles created are meant to evoke real-life piles of bodies from sites of atrocity, like Abu Ghraib, where Kerich sees resonances with the unconstrained power to violate bodies often granted to players in games. As a straight white American man, Kerich implicates himself and his own position of power in creating these spectacles…

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Matteo Bittanti

Works cited

Chris Kerich

Piles (excerpt)

digital video/machinima (1152 x 720), color, sound, 14”, 2018-2020, United States.

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ARTICLE: A CLOSER LOOK AT FILIP KOSTIC’S FILIP KOSTIC VS. FILIP KOSTIC

VRAL is currently showcasing Filip Kostic’s 2019 game video Filip Kostic VS. Filip Kosticin a brand new format. Today we dig deeper into this specific artwork by discussing the longer cut currently hosted on the artist’s website.

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For the record, there exist at the very least three distinct edits of Filip Kostic VS Filip Kostic: the artist’s website features a 22 minute and 10 second version. Additionally, Kostic tailored a unique cut exclusively for VRAL, with a duration of 16 minutes and 28 seconds. Interestingly, an even longer edit can be found on the internet. In this article, we focus on the 22-minute version, which can be watched on this very page.

The most widely debated book of Fall 2023 is, undoubtedly, Naomi Klein’s Doppelgänger, which explores a bizarre case of “identity crisis”. The Canadian author finds herself constantly mistaken for another esteemed public figure who happens to share her first name, Naomi Wolf, and Jewish heritage who gained fame through unexpected and controversial bestsellers, with Klein’s No Logo (1999) and Wolf’s The Beauty Myth (1990), among other things. In her unconventional memoir, Klein methodically elucidates the moments of mistaken identity, specifically in the context of online discourse and social media. Klein explains that this persistent confusion has left a lasting impact on her life and career over the years and led to existential self-questioning. She adds that the mix-ups became more frequent during the COVID-19 pandemic, when Wolf’s visibility increased significantly due to her controversial stances on lockdowns and vaccines. Klein kept Wolf at both literal and metaphorical distance. Despite the occasional unplanned overlaps, they never met or engaged in direct interaction.

In contrast, years earlier the Serbian artist Filip Kostic took a radically different approach when confronted with his own doppelgänger, Serbian soccer star Filip Kostic. Rather than avoid his twin, Kostic staged an elaborate performance directly engaging with the notion of identity, celebrity, and performance. In 2019, Kostic was contacted by the athlete’s PR team, wishing to purchase his @filipkostic Instagram handle. For years, Kostic’s account had been incorrectly tagged in posts of the soccer player due to homonimy. Declining a straightforward transaction, Kostic instead suggested a unique proposition: a FIFA Soccer match, streamed live before an audience, where the coveted prize would be ownership of the Instagram account.

As Kostic explains in the VRAL interview, “I was then linked to Filip’s manager via WhatsApp, whom I managed to convince that it is in Filip’s best interest to have a presence on Twitch.” The athlete’s management team warmed to the idea initially, hoping to generate media buzz. But apprehension set in when his soccer club caught wind of the plans. Nonetheless, the absurdist face-off proceeded as Filip Kostic VS Filip Kostic, staged as a flamboyant eSports event…

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Matteo Bittanti

Works cited

Filip Kostic

Filip Kostic VS. Filip Kostic, digital video, color, sound, 22’ 10”, Serbia, 2019

Filip Kostic VS. Filip Kostic, digital video, color, sound, 16’ 38”, Serbia, 2023 [2019]

All images and video courtesy of the artist

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ARTICLE: A CLOSER LOOK AT KAMILIA KARD'S TOXIC GARDEN - DANCE DANCE DANCE

The making of Toxic Garden - DANCE DANCE DANCE, Courtesy of Kamilia Kard, via TikTok

THEY SHOOT HORSES, DON’T THEY?

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Kamilia Kard’s latest project is both a point of departure and arrival. It is consistent with the artist’s ongoing study of parasociality and online relationships but, at the same time, it marks a new chapter in her exploration of the convergence between IRL practices and simulations through game-based technologies. Behind a facade of playful activities, this work is really about the toxicity of social media. 

The project was inspired by Cao Fai’s performances within Second Life, a proto-metaverse that was introduced in the early Zeroes. While still active, Linden Lab’s virtual world has been superseded by other platforms, including video games such as Minecraft, Fortnite, and Roblox. Nonetheless, Fei’s pioneering work showed how people’s behavior online tend to become more aggressive and disinhibited due to the anonymity afforded by their avatars, a virtual mask. Fei noted that this anti-social behavior tends to increase when the avatar is not a realistic mimesis of the player. In other words, the more fictional the avatar, the most aggressive the user’s behavior becomes. Although anecdotal, Fei’s conclusions prompted Kard to examine Roblox, an online open-ended building game introduced in 2006. 

Kard began experimenting with Roblox during the 2020 Covid-19 pandemic, which forced many countries, including (especially) Italy, under a regime of strict lockdowns. Popular among the young - children and teenagers - Roblox is often used as a virtual playground for socialization purposes. In her research, Kard followed a group of teenagers who were struggling to fit in and play according to the established conventions and the required etiquette. They had trouble finding the “right” outfit and costume, the “right” maps, the “right” cliques, and the “right” slang. In other words, according to Kard, an artist/ethnographer in virtual worlds, rather than  introducing new, alternative ways of interacting compared to the “real world”, Roblox simply replicated the awkwardness and uncertainty of IRL relationships.

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Matteo Bittanti

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ARTICLE: THE ARTIST WAS ALWAYS ALREADY PRESENT

We shape our avatars, and our avatars, in turn, shape us.

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In Federica Di Pietrantonio's work, The Sims becomes a mirror world, a proto-metaverse through which the artist’s practice is both duplicated and extended, in the McLuhanian sense that media are extensions of our senses and organs. In Voyeurism (2019), the daily life of the artist also known as Federica is reenacted with/in The Sims, through the mundane performance of her avatar. She takes a bath, she exercises, she rants and raves, she dances. 

As in several other her works, the ‘action’ takes place in the lavatory, which doubles as a gym, a dance floor, and a studio. Voyeurism's repetitive 'narrative' mirrors the uneventfulness of the artist' daily life. Nothing salient happens and the artist even briefly disappears from the frame. Then, she's back in action to mop the floor, send a text, listen to the music. The video lasts approximately fifteen minutes, but could go on forever, as in a live simulation… 

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Matteo Bittanti

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ARTICLE: PERFORMING WITH/IN RED DEAD REDEMPTION

Elisa Sanchez, En mémoire de Dandelion, video, sound, 4’ 12”, 2021, France

Today is the last day to watch Elisa Sanchez' Au-delà du désert flou, plus aucune sauvegarde n’est possible on VRAL. To celebrate the conclusion of the exhibition, we look back at three artworks that appropriate and repurpose Red Dead Redemption.

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In the past few years, several artists have used Red Dead Redemption 2/Online to create remarkable, often unclassifiable works. Although Rockstar Games’ Wild West themed videogame is the common denominator, the artists’ approach, intent, and execution vary considerably. Let’s consider three examples: Marie Foulston’s The Grannies, Kara Güt’s Welcome to my Desert Nexus (Deep inside my desert heart), and Elisa Sanchez’ Au-delà du désert flou, plus aucune sauvegarde n’est possible.

Let’s start with The Grannies. A short documentary clocking at 17 minutes, the film was originally conceived as a two channel installation at Now Play This, a video game festival in London. It presents the experiences of a group of players calling themselves The Grannies as they discover a secret area of the game where “normal” (read: consistent with the designers’ original intentions) rules do not apply. The players use their avatar as a vessel to explore such bizarre and weird territory. Here the relationship between the player and the avatar is clear and unambiguous. The filmmaker’s emphasis is on the artificiality of the simulation and the unexpected materiality of ethereal game spaces. The Grannies is first and foremost a statement about the nature of video games made by expert players, i.e. Kalonica Quigley and Marigold Bartlett, Melbourne-based friends and game developers, along with friends and fellow game-makers Ian MacLarty and Andy Brophy. Formally speaking, the video maintains the split screen/dual screen format of the original installation, unlike the works by Güt and Sanchez, which follow a less hyper-mediated approach, thus resulting in a more immediate and “transparent” viewing experience.

Kara Güt’s Welcome to my Desert Nexus introduces an extra level of performativity. Based on an existing screenplay, it features a group of player-actors performing within the game Red Dead Redemption Online before a live audience. Gemma Fantacci describes Welcome to my Desert Nexus as a“three-act play combining different aspects of performance and online gaming, IRL acting, and avatar dramatization”. A commentary on the myth of the frontier - “a facade upon which the player could paint their fantasies, just as the frontier of digital space is a facade for the same. In thinking about the facade and the false promise of infinity” (Kara Güt) - Welcome to my Desert Nexus is primarily a live performance, one in which things could go wrong - both on a technical and practical level. The actors' performance is recorded and subsequently shown as a machinima. Kara Güt’s Welcome to my Desert Nexus is a groundbreaking hybrid of gaming and theater, literally and metaphorically redefining the notion of “play”, in physical and online spaces. The theatrical performance is imbued with liveness, that special kind of hic et nunc that Walter Benjamin calls the “aura” of the artwork and that Philip Auslander explored in his seminal text Liveness: Performance in a Mediatized Culture (1999). Although the play does feature meta referential elements (it was, after all, inspired by Sartre’s No Exit) , it is mostly consistent with the Wild West tropes and conventions of the original source, Red Dead Redemption. The actors maintain their in-character persona throughout the entire play….

Matteo Bittanti

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EVENT: CHLOÉ DESMOINEAUX (NOVEMBER 26 - DECEMBER 9 2021, ONLINE)

LIPSTRIKE

live recording of online performance

digital video (1280 x 720), sound, color, 10’, 2021 [2016], France

Created by Chloé Desmoineaux


Originally created in 2016, Lipstrike is an online performance in Counter-Strike that uses an unusual device as a weapon: a lipstick. Each time the artist applies cosmetics on her lips, her gun unleashes a torrent of bullets. She broadcast her performances on Twitch, receiving thousands of snarky comments by angry gamers, which were subsequently collected and published in a limited edition booklet. Five years later, the artist has updated the original iteration for VRAL. One question remains: has anything changed since #Gamergate?

Interested in tactical media, hacking culture, and cyberfeminism, Chloé Desmoineaux creates media experiments through performances, installations, and hijacked video games. She is particularly concerned about the place given to women as well as dissident and “minority” people in the video game industry and she tries to create spaces of visibility and reflection to discuss these issues. She is a member of the Freesson Collective which focuses on supporting creative practices and electronic music. It also organizes events and workshops on digital art and culture. Co-organizer of the Art Games Demos (2017-2019) initiative with Isabelle Arvers, Desmoineaux has curated several exhibitions about the culture, aesthetics and ideology of gaming in the past decade. Her work has been exhibited internationally. She led several workshops on alternative controllers, glitch aesthetics, interactive animations, and video games. Desmoineaux lives and works in Marseille.

EVENT: JAZZ IS A (VIDEO)GAME

We are DELIGHTED to announce a collaboration between the MILAN MACHINIMA FESTIVAL and Roma Jazz Festival 2021: CODE. For the very first time, the CELEBRATED MUSIC event features a special program entirely dedicated to machinima.

JAZZ IS A (VIDEO) GAME

November 6 2021, Rome

45th Roma Jazz Festival, Auditorium Parco della Musica

November 7 2021, Mestre

M9 – Museo del Novecento di Mestre

November 14 2021, Spoleto

Teatro Caio Melisso di Spoleto

“JAZZ IS A (VIDEO) GAME” is a multimedia event taking place on November 6 2021 at 9 pm at the Auditorium Parco della Musica – Teatro Studio Borgna in Rome. “JAZZ IS A (VIDEO) GAME” (and subsequently in Mestre and Spoleto on November 7 and 14 respectively) will see a performance by YOUNG ART JAZZ ENSEMBLE conducted by MARIO CORVINI, a group of young talented musicians from Italian regions such as Lazio, Tuscany and Sicily.

The performance will feature several machinima previously presented both at the MILAN MACHINIMA FESTIVAL, including Luca Miranda and Riccardo Retez’ America (HD Remastered), Florian Hofnar Krepčik’s Is it love? Of course not!, Jordy Veenstra’s Regression, and Benoit Paillé’s HYPER LAPSE GTAV, currently showing on VRAL (October 29 - November 11 2021).

Florian Hofnar Krepčik, Is it real love? Of course not! (2013)

Florian Hofnar Krepčik, Is it real love? Of course not! (2013)

Founded in October 2012, the orchestra soon performed at the Museo d’Arte Contemporanea MACRO in Rome. In February 2013, they began their collaboration with Casa del Jazz in Rome. In 2017, they became Resident Orchestra for Fondazione Musica per Roma. In 2016 and 2017, the New Talents Jazz Orchestra performed “Il jazz va al cinema” (Jazz goes to the movies), a series of concerts conceived and curated by Maurizio Miotti, at Teatro Palladium. Another important collaboration took place in 2019 with the prestigious chamber orchestra I Solisti Aquilani, with whom the New Talents Jazz Orchestra developed the project “La musica del cinema italiano” (The music of Italian cinema), an original reinterpretation of the most important themes from soundtracks of well known Italian movies. This year, the IMF Foundation led by Mario Ciampà commissioned the New Talent Orchestra to head the project “JAZZ IS A (VIDEO) GAME”. In conjunction with Conservatorio di Santa Cecila and Saint Louis College of Music (videogames music course), they composeds. The project features the participation of The Orchestra and the Colours Jazz Orchestra.

Benoit Paillé, HYPER LAPSE GTAV (2014)

Read more about “JAZZ IS A (VIDEO) GAME”

Purchase your ticket: Rome Jazz Festival

Purchase your ticket: M9 – Museo del Novecento di Mestre

Purchase your ticket: Teatro Caio Melisso di Spoleto

JAZZ IS A (VIDEO) GAME

6 novembre 2021, Roma

45° edizione del Roma Jazz Festival in Auditorium Parco della Musica

7 novembre 2021, Mestre

M9 – Museo del Novecento di Mestre

14 novembre 2021, Spoleto

Teatro Caio Melisso di Spoleto

 

Jazz is a (video) game, progetto articolato e interdisciplinare che verrà presentato da due giovani orchestre – la Young Art Jazz Ensemble diretta da Mario Corvini e la Colours Orchestra diretta da Massimo Morganti – il 6 novembre in anteprima nazionale alla 45° edizione del Roma Jazz Festival in Auditorium Parco della Musica, il 7 novembre a M9 – Museo del 900 di Mestre e il 14 novembre al Teatro Caio Melisso di Spoleto. Ogni data ha un doppio orario, quello pomeridiano in forma di prove aperte riservate alle famiglie e ai più piccoli, mentre quello serale sarà il concerto vero e proprio.

Jazz is a (video) game è un concerto multimediale in cui i due ensemble si confronteranno con i machinima, opere che si situano all’incrocio fra videoarte, cinema sperimentale e animazione digitale open source, realizzate utilizzando frammenti e sequenze di celebri videogames – come GTA Gran Theft Auto, Flight Simulator, Traindrive, The Hunter, Chernobilyte, Backbone, The Longest Road on Earth. Il jazz, linguaggio atemporale che si sposta fluidamente da decennio a decennio, è sempre stato in grado di interpretare i cambiamenti sociali in atto, costantemente all’avanguardia nel relazionarsi di volta in volta all’innovazione tecnologica (il grammofono, il vinile, il cinema, i video), determinando un rapporto lungo e fecondo con le immagini e la dimensione visuale.

Le musiche sono state composte da alcuni componenti delle due orchestre, dal Corso di Musica Applicata del Conservatorio di Santa Cecilia e della Scuola di Alta Formazione la Saint Louis Music College. In questo preciso momento storico in cui giovani e giovanissimi musicisti si stanno liberando dal passato, portando avanti un approccio al jazz nel segno della leggerezza, le big band e le formazioni orchestrali sono sempre di più un luogo di progettualità e ricerca, uno strumento per diffondere la conoscenza di questo genere musicale e per coinvolgere i nuovi pubblici.

Il progetto è finanziato dal Ministero della Cultura, sostenuto dalla IMF Foundation e promosso da tre importanti realtà culturali: Venetojazz, Visioninmusica e Roma Jazz Festival, membri della Associazione Nazionale Italian Jazz Platform. Si avvale della consulenza dello scrittore, docente e direttore artistico del Milan Machinima Festival, Matteo Bittanti e vede anche la partecipazione internazionale di importanti videomakers come Benoit Paillé, Jordy Veenstra, Riccardo Retez, Luca Miranda, Florian Krepcik, Ashford Philip Ciampà.

(fonte: Umbria Domani)

A CLOSER LOOK AT KINGDOM OF SHADOWS

The current VRAL show features Amir Yatziv’s groundbreaking work Kingdom of Shadows, a multimedia project focusing on an unusual audition: an actress (Neta Shpigelman) is trying to win the part of a computer game character in a successful series, Final Fantasy. The setup is both spartan and dense.

Her performance is evaluated by a famous Japanese computer game director, played by Eliya Tsuchida. Several avatars are auditioned for this role, which requires them to repeatedly cross the thin line that separates reality from fiction, until it completely disappears. A conceptual tour de force, Kingdom of Shadows is also a remarkable technical feat: the human actor is wearing a motion-capture suit on stage that captures her movements and facial expressions and instantly translates them into those of her digital counterpart on a giant screen, who is perceived, by the viewers, as the “real” actor. Her acting thus is simultaneously captured and translated by way of performance-capture technology. We see extreme closeups, weird angles, abrupt moves, and funny gestures, although we are perfectly aware that something is lost, including the fact that Shpigelman — gesticulating onstage in her black bodysuit — is extremely pregnant.

Kingdom of Shadows is a meditation on the proliferation of doppelgängers, replicas, and avatars in contemporary culture, a theme that also recurs in Yatziv’s latest project, Non Player Character (2021). However, it is not a warning about replacement, extinction or body snatching. On the contrary, the artist sees the avatar as a synthesis of the human and the post-human.

the avatar [embodies] the best of the human and the best of the machine. This is something new for me, but I look at this work as an experiment. What I am trying to do is to combine the strengths of these two agents, the machine and the human being. (Amir Yatziv)

At the same time, the work seems to suggest that any attempts to reach a “solid” emotional connection between the parties involved, suggesting that technologically mediated social distancing today is a prerequisite for professional success and, perhaps, even for emotional survival.

Interestingly, Kingdom of Shadows has been presented under various guises. The current VRAL show features a recording of the live animation performance that took place at the Jerusalem Theater during the Israeli Festival in June 2021, but there’s an additional performance that took place at Artport Tel Aviv 2021 on July 7 2021 which adds new elements, including a new epilogue and a completely different coda. The artist is considering more iterations. In that sense, Kingdom of Shadows is not a single text, but like a video game, is many different texts at once, many possible worlds, an incubator of fantasies.

Matteo Bittanti