slow machinima

ARTICLE: STILL DIGGING, A DECADE LATER

VRAL is currently featuring Merlin Dutertre’s Lullaby (2019). To provide a richer context, we delve into some of the influential works that have shaped his artistic journey. In this segment, we examine Jon Rafman’s seminal A Man Digging (2013), which a decade ago dared to challenge conventional gaming paradigms, elevating the act of gameplay into an artful meditation on the very essence of existence itself.

PATREON-EXCLUSIVE CONTENT

〰️

PATREON-EXCLUSIVE CONTENT 〰️

In a revealing interview, Dutertre traces his introduction to machinima back to his formative years in the 2010s, a time when YouTube played a central role in the making of his identity as a filmmaker. Back then, Dutertre engaged enthusiastically with French YouTube gaming content, even though the concept of machinima first eluded his full understanding and, therefore, appreciation. However, it was during his high school years that Dutertre’s curiosity was ignited, courtesy of Jon Rafman’s work, particularly A Man Digging (2013). Rafman’s unconventional approach, based on appropriating and recontextualizing Max Payne 3 (Rockstar Games, 2012), stood apart from the typical bombastic and often juvenile vernacular machinima fare. For Dutertre, that encounter was a true epiphany.

In A Man Digging, Rafman embarks on a fascinating exploration of eerie virtual landscapes marred by abject violence. The artist skillfully interweaves game footage from the ultra-violent crime story with introspective voice-over narration that plunges into the puzzling transcendental categories of time and memory. Rafman’s narrative strategy – reminiscent of the style of the video essay – marks a radical departure from the expected role of a player. While countless online videos typically document in-game achievements, suggest ways of “gaining advantage” or provide detailed walkthroughs, Rafman’s approach is refreshingly unique. He deliberately eradicates every in-game computer-controlled character before recording footage, thereby setting the stage for an unparalleled viewing experience. We are left to contemplate the aftermath of a massacre. The calm after the storm. A Man Digging is an artistic walkthrough inspired by the avant garde practice of Chris Marker, whose works often take on an essayistic form, blending elements of documentary, fiction, and personal reflection...

(continues)

Matteo Bittanti


Works cited

Chris Marker, Ouvroir the Movie, digital video, color, sound, 29’ 49”, 2008, France

Jon Rafman, A Man Digging, digital video, color, sound, 8’ 20, 2013, Canada

Jon Rafman with Rosa Aiello, Remember Carthage, digital video color, sound, 13’ 43”, Canada

Rockstar Studios, Max Payne 3, Rockstar Games, 2012

All installation shots of A Man Digging © Moderna Museet

This is a Patreon exclusive content. For full access consider joining our growing community.

ARTICLE: THE ICONOGRAPHY OF ALIX DESAUBLIAUX’S MARCHE VERS L'EST

Alix Desaubliaux, Marche vers l’Est, 2016

FINDING JOY AT THE END OF THE WORLD

Patreon-exclusive content

〰️

Patreon-exclusive content 〰️

Marche vers l'est (2016) is an improvised performance in search of the end of the world in Skyrim, in which the artist deliberately looks for ways to break the game in order to bring its sheer artificiality to the foreground. As Alix Desaubliaux explains,

I wanted to play with the very concept of role playing. The character discovers that he is trapped in an artificial setting, a constructed world, a very elaborate trap. I made March of the East by chance, because I got bored with the game’s quest — the assigned goal so to speak — and I wanted to explore further and discover the boundaries of the territory I was traversing. As I used a cheat code to cross the last frontier between the playable world and the Out of Bounds area, I kind of gave up on my character in my mind and I knew I was leading her to an inevitable end. I knew I wasn’t going to play anymore as I was supposed to. But the more I walked east, the more I was surprised about the indefiniteness of the world. I was expecting an abrupt end, a fall into the void or something. This experimental exploration ends after a day and a night of (in-game) walking. The game map becomes gradually distorted but outside, there is no difference at all, apart from the main island that is no longer viewable. It was largely sufficient for me: I didn't want to push until I maybe came across an invisible wall or something that could technically end the world.

(continues)

Matteo Bittanti

This is a Patreon exclusive article. To read the full text and access the content consider joining our Patreon community.

ARTICLE: THE ICONOGRAPHY OF ALIX DESAUBLIAUX’S DOGMEAT

Alix Desaubliaux, L’Autre Monster (The Other Monster), 2021

MAN’S BEST VIRTUAL FRIEND

Patreon-exclusive content

〰️

Patreon-exclusive content 〰️

Dogmeat is the name of the loyal, faithful dog that accompanies the player in the post-apocalyptic scenarios of Fallout 4. This virtual animal was originally baded on River, the German shepherd of two of the developers at Bethesda. Also titled Dogmeat, this 2016 machinima focuses on the virtual animal and the emotional bond he shares with the player. Dogmeat is the solution to the breakdown of the simulation: it draws the character into an awareness of the fiction and the artificiality that surrounds him, the virtual setting in which they both find themselves. Dogmeat comprises a series of vignette at time uncanny, tender, tragic. It is a reminder that we are replacing IRL nature with its simulation. And yes, in case you were wondering we are, indeed, living in Philip K. Dick’s world...

(continues)

Matteo Bittanti

Works cited

Alix Desaubliaux

Dogmeat

digital video/machinina, color, sound, 16' 31', 2016, France

This is a Patreon exclusive article. To read the full text and access the content consider joining our Patreon community.

ARTICLE: A CLOSER LOOK AT ALIX DESAUBLIAUX’S L’AUTRE MONSTRE

Alix Desaubliaux, L’Autre Monster (The Other Monster), 2021

WHY LOOK AT VIRTUAL ANIMALS?

Patreon-exclusive content

〰️

Patreon-exclusive content 〰️

A hybrid of video essay, conceptual walkthrough, visual poem, and documentary, L’Autre Monster (The Other Monster) exemplifies the most experimental side of machinima. The French artist - who’s been working with video games for several years - uses Capcom’s Monster Hunter World (2018) to bring to the foreground the affective nature of playing, that it, the emotional, emphatic connections created by interaction design, and specifically, by the relationship between the player and her/his avatars, that is, alter egos and sidekicks. At the same time, Desaubliaux highlights the inner workings of the virtual world simulated in the game, flora and fauna. Specifically, she brings to the viewer’s attention the sheer contradictions between the pro-environmental message of the game and the reality of video game playing, as game-related technologies - including streaming - are extremely power hungry and thus their carbon footprint is far from negligible. It’s remarkable that the more we destroy the environment on a daily basis, the more we strive to reconstruct an idealized version of “nature” in video games and virtual worlds where there is no trash, litter, and microplastics. In a sense, we are replacing IRL nature with its simulation. We live in Philip K. Dick’s world.

The rationale is simple: economics. Virtual worlds are just products to be sold to the masses and there’s nothing that works better than a cute, smiling creature from across the screen to close the deal. Desaubliaux stresses that the appeal of these kinds of games is the liveness of the worlds they depict, their dynamics and their responsiveness. But she also emphasizes the artificially of such constructs with an insistent use of glitches throughout the video: a beetle breaks apart and a cascade of pixels take over the screen. A close up of branches and leaves show the highly geometric, polygonal-nature of this world. Still, the sunsets and sunrises are always perfect. Rivers and oceans are clean. Animals roam free instead of becoming either roadkill or fodder for industrial farming. Desaubliaux engages in critical play, to borrow Mary Flanagan’s expression. She is also an explorer (in Richard Bartle’s terms) and a documentary filmmaker.

She is also a geologist and an ethnographer. She uses the virtual camera to zoom in and out. Several sequences of her monumental documentary are reminiscent of the screensavers of AppleTV and of virtual aquariums: spectacular scenes shot by drones, up high in the sky so that the mess below is not visible, or simulations of microworlds, such as a fish tank in which entropic forces are kept at bay. She mentions the inherent tension between being a “tourist” in virtual worlds and a true resident, a “local”, which is how the game community perceives itself. It’s not just about aesthetics: to fully belong, one must be fluent in the language of the game and its creatures. One must be familiar with the lore, that is virtual folklore. She describes how players create this world by projecting their emotions onto the creatures that populate it, algorithms dressed up in fancy textures… 

(continues)

Matteo Bittanti

Works cited

Alix Desaubliaux

L’Autre Monster (The Other Monster)

digital video/machinima (1920 x 1080), color, sound, 48’ 26”, 2021, France (in French with English subtitles)

This is a Patreon exclusive article. To read the full text and access the content consider joining our Patreon community.

ARTICLE: THE ICONOGRAPHY OF CHRISTIAN WRIGHT'S WEEABOO WARRIOR

Christian Wright, Hugging Embrace, 2014

PURE BATHOS

Patreon-exclusive content

〰️

Patreon-exclusive content 〰️

According to Urban Dictionary, the term Weeaboo “indicates a person who retains an unhealthy obsession with Japan and Japanese culture, typically ignoring or even shunning their own racial and cultural identity. Many weeaboos talk in butchered Japanese with the 8 or so words they know (i.e. kawaii, desu, ni chan). While weeaboos claim to love and support Japanese culture, counter intuitively, they tend to stereotype Japanese culture by how it appears in their favorite anime, which can be safely assumed to be offensive to the Japanese.”

Christian Wright's playful early machinima Weeaboo Warrior plays homage to the extreme Japanophilia of many Western gamers, or any gamer who is not of Asian descent. A tragicomic tale of a knight who desperately needs a new sword to fulfill his goals as an avatar, this machinima explores the bathos that permeates Dark Souls, thanks to an epic soundtrack that mixes Max Richter’s On The Nature Of Daylight and Motoi Sakuraba’s The Ancient Dragon. Another Wright's trademark — the use of intertitles or captions — is also at play. Once again, the juxtaposition of text and image create hilarious outcomes.

(continues)

Matteo Bittanti

Works cited

Christian Wright

Weeaboo Warrior

digital video/machinima (1920 x 1080), color, sound, 09’ 59”, 2015, United Kingdom

This is a Patreon exclusive article. To read the full text and access the content consider joining our Patreon community.

ARTICLE: THE ICONOGRAPHY OF CHRISTIAN WRIGHT'S HUGGING EMBRACE

Christian Wright, Hugging Embrace, 2014

“SOMETHING BULGING IN THE DEPTHS OF HIS LEATHER PANTS”

Patreon-exclusive content

〰️

Patreon-exclusive content 〰️

A bizarre slo-mo conversation between two robotic characters about a “luring bulge” and “golden eyes” that sound sounds like it was lifted from a cheap erotic novel, Hugging Embrace, one of Christian Wright’s earliest machinima, takes glitching to the next level. Characters literally break apart as they discuss the need to find a more private place to indulge in post-human intimacies. The penetration test seems successful, as polygons converge and then explode in a myriad of pieces. A single caress produces unfathomable damage as hands disappear into bodies without organs and limbs vanish in a mountain of hay. Characters’ legs and arms twist unnaturally. A bodily union becomes a literal merging of dark souls. The video illustrates the cheesy dialogue in a comic way and obscenity turns into hilarity. Hugging Embrace redefines kinky for the avatar age. There’s flesh. And there’s skin. There are lubricated shafts. But not the kind you imagine.

“This was juicy”, we are told.

Oh yeah, that was juicy.

(continues)

Matteo Bittanti

Works cited

Christian Wright

Hugging Embrace

digital video/machinima (1920 x 1080), color, sound, 14’ 30”, 2014, United Kingdom

This is a Patreon exclusive article. To read the full text and access the content consider joining our Patreon community.

ARTICLE: THE ICONOGRAPHY OF CHRISTIAN WRIGHT'S HOLY SPIRIT

Christian Wright, Holy Spirit, 2016

THE “X” ON YOUR CONTROLLER IS A CROSS, YOU KNOW.

Patreon-exclusive content

〰️

Patreon-exclusive content 〰️

Clocking at less than three minutes and thirty seconds, Holy Spirit is the shortest of the three installments comprising Wright’s triptych. It is also the most intense. Shock and awe: a frontal attack on all senses, Holy Spirit uses repetition as its main rhetorical tool. Scenes repeat three times, creating a pattern of violence and devastation. The sound (noise?) is brash and harsh throughout the entire video. A long shriek is accompanied by the visual deconstruction of the onscreen images, as glitches and other kinds distortions and corruptions gradually take over. Nobody will hear you screaming in a virtual space.

(continues)

Matteo Bittanti

Works cited

Christian Wright

Son

digital video/machinima (1920 x 1080), color, sound, 14’ 59”, 2016, United Kingdom

Father

digital video/machinima (1920 x 1080), color, sound, 10’ 13”, 2016, United Kingdom

Holy Spirit

digital video/machinima (1920 x 1080), color, sound, 3’ 21”, 2016, United Kingdom

This is a Patreon exclusive article. To read the full text and access the content consider joining our Patreon community.

ARTICLE: THE ICONOGRAPHY OF CHRISTIAN WRIGHT'S FATHER

Christian Wright, Father, 2016

IS VIDEO GAME PLAYING A CULT?

Patreon-exclusive content

〰️

Patreon-exclusive content 〰️

The work we’re currently exhibiting on VRAL, Son, is part of a monumental project created by Christian Wright in 2016, consisting of a trifecta of machinima titled Father, Son, and Holy Spirit respectively. The fil rouge connecting these works is the idea of ritualistic play, that is, the repetitive actions performed by the player, which Wright associates to the supernatural as it is represented in video games and in gaming communities. Father’s main “characters” are the four elements — Earth, Water, Air and Fire — which are interspersed with religious iconography, including the image of a fish, several churches, altars, tabernacles, and crosses.

Punctuated by the recurring use of slow motion and fixed camera, Father opens with the image of people floating or falling from the sky, a metaphor for the biblical falling of Man (sic) and the need for redemption through the sacrifice of Christ in the Christian mythology (in fact, the Savior himself does make an appearance at 3’ 09”). We see hordes of undead and walking skeletons pray for the return of the Sun/Son of God, either in natural environments and human made infrastructures, such as cathedrals.

(continues)

Matteo Bittanti

This is a Patreon exclusive article. To read the full text and access the content consider joining our Patreon community.

ARTICLE: A CLOSER LOOK AT CHRISTIAN WRIGHT'S SON

Nikolaus Geyrhalter, Homo Sapiens, 2016

FROM RITUAL TO MACHINIMA: THE HUMAN SERIOUSNESS OF PLAY

Patreon-exclusive content

〰️

Patreon-exclusive content 〰️

The work we’re currently exhibiting on VRAL is part of a monumental project developed by Christian Wright in 2016, consisting of a trilogy of machinima titled Father, Son, Holy Spirit. The thread connecting these works is the idea of ritualistic play, that is, the repetitive actions performed by the player, which Wright connects to the idea of the supernatural as represented in digital gaming and in game communities. In these works, religious themes and mundane concerns are intertwined. Likewise, the sacred and the profane are juxtaposed audaciously. Unlike many of his peers, Wright tends to use multiple games at once to create his machinima: in Son, for instance, NieR: Automata and Grand Theft Auto V are cleverly juxtaposed. He records footage from a variety of titles and then edits the most interesting bits to produce a cogent narrative. 

What impresses about Wright is an uncommon ability to mix the vernacular and the avant-garde. For instance, Son was inspired both by Caspar David Friedrich’s sublime landscapes, whose imagery is all but manifest in many of the frames, but also by the work of Austrian filmmaker Nikolau Geyrhalter, whose outstanding series of documentaries includes Earth (2019), Pripyat (1999) and Homo Sapiens (2016). The latter, which Wright mentions as a key inspiration, depicts a disquieting scenario whereby the world made by people is slowly won back by nature. At once a science fiction narrative and a documentary, Homo Sapiens is speaking both of the contingent moment and of a post-apocalyptic future. Likewise, Son depicts an array of realistic and fantastic environments, creating some kind of cognitive dissonance in the mind of the spectator...

(continues)

Matteo Bittanti

This is a Patreon exclusive article. To read the full text consider joining our Patreon community.

EVENT: CHRISTIAN WRIGHT (OCTOBER 14-27 2022, ONLINE)

SON

digital video/machinima (1920 x 1080), colour, sound, 14’ 59”, 2016, United Kingdom

Created by Christian Wright

Christian Wright reframes painting and cinema through the medium of the video game. Inspired by Caspar David Friedrich’s landscapes and by the extended duration of slow cinema, the artist references historical events and religious themes, but also fictional narratives, sagas and myths of the near future, introducing an expanded narrative that defies easy categorizations. Part of a trilogy, Son investigates the spiritual through the technical, using the notion of ritual as a point of departure. By emphasizing the in-between, the interstitial, and the liminal, the work transforms inactivity into revelation, emptiness into wholeness.

Christian Wright (b. 1993, Newcastle upon Tyne) is a digital media artist working with video games and animated assets to blend cinematic and machinima visual languages. Through this frame, he looks at how the boundaries of normal play are stretched by the performative actions of players themselves. Whether it be the intimate physical interactions of online multiplayer, the choreographed quest for perfection of speedrunning, or the mimetic act of digital cosplay within character creators, Christian places community driven gestures at the forefront.

WATCH NOW

EVENT: JASON ROUSE (JUNE 10 - JUNE 23 2022, ONLINE)

KOSSOFF FLEES UKRAINE

digital video/machinima (2160 x 1440), color, sound, 31’ 12”, 2022, Northern Ireland

Created by Jason Rouse

Machinima, landscape painting, first-person shooters, walking simulators, and photogrammetry. Jason Rouse’s new artwork is a triumph of remediation as it incorporates, repurposes, and transforms a variety of media, genres, and aesthetics. It is simultaneously an art history lesson and a meditation on current events delivered via Unity 3D. As the title suggests, this work is about Leon Kossoff (1926–2019), one of the most influential British painters of the XIX century, who was also the son of two Ukrainian refugees fleeing persecution during the 1903-1906 pogrom. Kossoff Flees Ukraine reconstructs that miraculous escape through the forests and mountains of Europe, while updating the narrative to another tragedy, the ongoing invasion of Ukraine by Russia. The outcome is a document about the past that speaks about the contingent moment.

Jason Rouse (b. 1985) is an Irish artist living and working in Cardiff, Wales. In Rouse’s work, digital and traditional arts converge, creating unexpected results. Rouse has painted game landscapes, developed interactive games, and experimented with generative spaces. Rouse has been a finalist with Lumen Prize for Digital Art, exhibited at the inaugural Westmorland Landscape Prize and selected for the 2020 BEEP Painting Prize. He has received a Wales Art International grant for SWITCHed, an exchange program between Arcade Cardiff and Galerie RDV, Nantes. His album of solo Irish traditional music on Uilleann Pipes has won critical acclaim from both press and peers.

WATCH NOW

NEWS: ELISA SANCHEZ (MAY 27 - JUNE 9 2022, ONLINE)

AU-DELÀ DU DÉSERT FLOU, PLUS AUCUNE SAUVEGARDE N’EST POSSIBLE

digital video/machinima (1920 x 1080), color, sound 43’, 2021, France

Created by Elisa Sanchez

“I’m tired of playing cowboy” says Elisa Sanchez, referring to her experience with Red Dead Redemption 2. To spice up things, she uses cheat modes and modifies the original game. And so she discovers weird architectures, bizarre landscapes, and bottomless rivers, among other things. Her metaphysical journey into the Wilder West to escape her “house arrest” due to the Pandemic lockdown becomes the stuff of legend. The result is a slow, contemplative, meditative machinima situated at the intersection of video art, video essay, and video diary. A warning: if you cross the blurred desert, you won’t be able to save your progress.

Born in Toulouse, France in 1997, Elisa Sanchez is likely France’s most well known artiste-astronaute and a recent graduate of the Haute école des arts du Rhin Mulhouse, Strasbourg. In 2021, she completed her thesis project entitled Le Cowboy et Le Astronaut under the supervision of Anne Foret. Her first machinima, Au-delà du désert flou, plus aucune sauvegarde n’est possible, was screened at the international film festival Cinéma du Réel in March 2022.

WATCH NOW