EVENT: SATURDAY MORNING ANIMATION CLUB (JUNE 11, 18, 25 - JULY 2, 9 2022, ONLINE)

SATURDAY MORNING ANIMATION CLUB

Curated by Petra Széman in partnership with isthisit? and Off Site Project

Supported by Arts Council England

Saturday June 11, 18, 25 2022

Saturday July 2, 9 2022

online (registration required, see below for details and links)

Saturday Morning Animation Club is a terrific screening/talk series taking place over five consecutive Saturday mornings, featuring new works by Emily Mulenga, Petra Szemán, David Blandy, Christian Wright, and Bob Bicknell-Knight. Each screening will be followed by a second presentation featuring a commentary by the artist, and will conclude with a Q&A session. The curators’ goal is “to re-capture the excitement of watching cartoons over the weekend and celebrate all forms of fandom”.

Full details

Saturday Morning Animation Club is a series of screenings + talks across five weeks between 11 June - 9 July, showcasing films by people who wield the dual powers of being an artist and a nerd.

Unified by an early fascination and involvement with anime and games, each artist focuses in on the worlds and perspectives fandom allows for. From this angle the five videos broaden ideas of human and non-human perception, screen-based experiences, virtual worlds and alternative ways of being.

Join us on Saturday mornings for a screening of new video commissions by Emily Mulenga, Petra Szemán, David Blandy, Christian Wright and Bob Bicknell-Knight respectively, followed by a little insider walkthrough and a Q&A (via Zoom).

Tied together by a refusal to downplay the enthusiasms and generative energy of fandom, Saturday Morning Animation Club will lead viewers through iterations of animatic worlds, on- and off-screen, with or without player input. The screening series has been produced in collaboration with web projects isthisit? and Off Site Project. Attendance of all five screenings will be rewarded with a special prize.

The videos were commissioned using funding from Arts Council England as part of On Animatics, a cross-disciplinary project exploring the murky overlapping areas of contemporary art, animation, fandom, avatars and virtual worlds.To conclude the project, the book WEEB THEORY will be released later this year with Banner Repeater, edited by Petra Szemán and Jamie Sutcliffe.

Featured artwoks

June 11 2022, Emily Mulenga, Main Character (2022)

Main Character centres around the Bunny as she experiences the abrupt end of her relationship, set against the backdrop of her life in a cyberpunk city and her evening gig as a singer. Whilst the event tears a hole in the fabric of her reality, it leads to reflections on the nature of being and what can be discovered underneath surface appearances. Flipping between 3D visuals, 2D animation and live action footage, Emily’s film takes inspiration from cartoons, video games and music videos as means to navigate the character’s relationship to life.

Register here

June 18 2022, Petra Szemán, Openings !!! (2022)

Inhabiting the interstitial zones of anime credit sequences, video game loading screens and regional train journeys, Petra Szemán’s Openings !!! intensifies the gaps between the layers of animated imagery in an attempt to grasp the kinds of experience that may lie beyond human perceptual boundaries. The video follows the protagonist ‘Yourself’ as they ride local trains through intermedial landscapes. From this uniquely conceived and drafted kinetic viewpoint, fragments of different worlds segue into view, signalling perceptual ruptures that seemingly force subjectivity outside of itself, into strange new relationships of interdependency and intoxication with the moving image.

Register here

June 25 2022, David Blandy, Androids Dream (2022)

In Androids Dream, Blandy deconstructs the cyberpunk aesthetic first prototyped by Gibson’s Neuromancer (1984) and Scott’s Blade Runner (1982), and which has continued to be repeated and become ever more ossified. Formed of multiple simulacra, the work involves Unreal Engine assets, uses Kojima’s Snatcher - itself a replay of Blade Runner in videogame form - and even deploys an algorithmic mimesis of the artist's own voice. Breaking down the aesthetic form, the film in turn breaks down, repeats, refracts, and goes into reverse. 

Register here

July 02 2022, Christian Wright, Body Language (2022)

Primarily shot within the video game Dark Souls III (2016), Body Language tells the story of an epic encounter between two online players. Focusing on how the combatants communicate via the limited body language afforded to them by the game design and the performative traditions of gaming communities, Christian’s film combines the grandiosity of cinema with the janky awkwardness of gameplay. The result is both reminiscent of videos produced and shared in insular fan communities, while also relating to a burgeoning contemporary art and academic context. 

Register here

July 09 2022, Bob Bicknell-Knight, Non-Player Character (2022)

A looping CGI video, Bob’s Non-Player Character explores the NPC as a vehicle by which we can understand human navigation of an increasingly codified and controlled existence. Controlled by the AI software, NPCs have predetermined sets of behaviours. Doomed to repeat the same day their lives revolve around the player, waiting for interaction. Bob’s film imagines what enemy NPCs are thinking and feeling, forced to be defeated over and over, until their data becomes unreadable.

Register here

Featured artists

Emily Mulenga

Emily Mulenga (b. 1991, England) is a multimedia artist who imagines what a digital utopia might look like from a feminist and milennial perspective. Her output is the result of a ravenous media diet, blending the high polish aesthetics of MTV with the jagged polygons of early PlayStation games; mixing YouTube video conventions with lo-fi social media posts of her online contacts. Contributing to the excessive circulation of digital matter, she considers how the blurring between human and machine changes experiences of womanhood, and how becoming cyborg is both a fantasy and reality, the future and the present. (instagram)

Petra Szemán

Petra Szemán (b. 1994, Gateshead) is a moving image artist whose practice focuses on the murky borderlands along the arbitrary separation of the real and the fictional. Using a virtual version of themself as a protagonist journeying through animatic realms, they explore liminal spaces and threshold situations, looking to dissect the ways our memories and selves are constructed within a fictionally oversaturated landscape (both on- and off-screen). Turning away from considering cyberspace as a radically ‘other’ realm, Petra walks the line between dystopian and utopian frameworks, eyes set on new queer horizons. (instagram)

David Blandy

David Blandy (b. 1976, Brighton) investigates the stories and cultural forces that inform and influence our behaviour. Through a gaming art practice he has written original RPGs that address issues of social justice, climate change and our potential posthuman futures. Collaboration is central to his practice, used as a means to examine communal and personal heritage, as well as forms of interdependence. His practice ranges from installation, performance, writing, gaming and sound. He has had national and international solo exhibitions, and is represented by Seventeen Gallery, London. (instagram)

Christian Wright

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. (instagram)

Bob Bicknell-Knight

Bob Bicknell-Knight (b. 1996, Suffolk) is a multidisciplinary artist, curator and writer influenced by surveillance capitalism and responding to internet hyper consumerism, automation and technocratic authoritarianism. Within his practice he harnesses different processes and materials to create both physical and digital artworks, including fabric printing, painting, ceramics, bookmaking, 3D printing technologies and game development software. Key subjects of investigation include our complicity with corporate giants, the sculpting of online identities and the prescient qualities of dystopian science fiction. (instagram)

Read more: Petra Széman, isthisit?: Off Site Project (Instagram accounts)

NEWS: CHRIS KERICH IS NOT DONE PILING UP CORPSES

A screenshot from Piles (Hitman), a performance by Chris Kerich, 2018

There’s a powerful scene in Pablo Larrain’s Postmortem (2010), in which the protagonist Mario (Alfredo Castro), walks nonchalantly among piles of bodies. Mario is a transcription clerk in a hospital morgue that suddenly fills up due to an unforeseen event. Postmortem is set in September 1973, after the CIA-backed coup that culminated with the overthrowing of the democratically elected president Salvador Allende and the extermination of thousands of Chileans (Americans are generally cool with direct intervention in other countries’ internal affairs — elections included — as long as they are the perpetrators rather than the victims: this is why “9/11” means very different things to Chileans and Americans).

Chris Kerich’s Viscera Cleanup Detail (Piles) is featured in this year’s special screening series THE CLASSICAL ELEMENTS. Clocking at around eighty minutes, is the longest work at MMF MMXXI, but it’s only a portion of a larger body of work (no pun intended) entitled Piles (2018), “a collection of over 22 hours of video recordings, livestreamed on Twitch, of the piling up of dead or unconscious bodies in seven different video games: Dishonored: Death of the Outsider, Skyrim, Hitman, Metal Gear Solid V, Viscera Cleanup Detail, Slime Rancher, and Tabletop Simulator.” In a wide ranging video interview with Gemma Fantacci, Luca Miranda, and Riccardo Retez, the American artist currently enrolled in a PhD program at U.C. Santa Cruz discusses a project that spawned a variety of paratexts, including eight short critical essays on his website (here’s one on Dishonored, here’s another on Hitman). The pace of Piles is eclectic, ranging from the frantic to the slow and meditative (Hitman is a perfect example of “slow machinima”).

Viscera Cleanup Detail (2015) is a self-referential janitorial simulation game developed by RuneStorm. Players perform as a janitor tasked with cleaning up the gory aftermath of gunfights that have taken place in various science fiction environments. The goal is to remove bodies, corpses, limbs and organs left behind by unseen characters. However, the artist’s intention clashes with the game designers’ intended goals. As Kerich explains in his accompanying statement,

In this video I do anything but clean, and actually leave the level I have selected, “Evil Science”, even dirtier than it was to begin with. […] I only use the mop to try to dislodge a limb that is stuck under a table and otherwise just use the janitors’ ability to carry things to create the pile.

Piles is a multi-layered commentary on themes ranging from the ethics of game mechanics to the representation of death in digital spaces. “Like all the other bodies in this project, their mechanical function and infrastructural purpose defines their representation and their corporeality,” he concludes. If somebody were to stumble into one of his videos on the web — which would not be easy since they are unlisted on YouTube and “surrounded” by contextual, critical information on the artist’ website — they could hastily dismiss them as just another of the hundreds of prankish, juvenile videos currently hosted on YouTube (yes, body piling in video games is a “thing”). But unlike most of such vernacular videos, Piles has a strong political subtext. As Kerich explains,

The symbolic resonance of a pile of bodies in a game is political. The mechanics of how a pile of bodies is made in a game is political. The infrastructure governing how aesthetic representation maps to gameplay mechanics in a game is political. Who has access to power, and what kind, in a game is political. Who has the access and time to play a game is political. Watch closely, and take none of it for granted.

Both the invisible janitor of Viscera Cleanup Detail and the morgue clerk in Larrain’s Postmortem seem cogs in the machine: after all, piling up bodies or certifying their deaths is just a bureaucratic gesture, devoid of any meaning or consequence. They cannot undo what just happened nor they show any interest to. On one level, they are mere accomplices. On another, however, the obsessive repetition of their mortifying acts and the accumulation of inanimate objects elevate their task to the realm of performance art.

Chris Kerich is a programmer and artist living and working in Santa Cruz, California. He is interested in systems — and their breaking up —, constrained art, information, critical science studies, and video games. A candidate in the Doctorate program in Film and Digital Media Studies at the University of California, Santa Cruz, Chris received a Master of Arts from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) in 2017 and a Bachelor of Science from Carnegie Mellon University in 2013. His works has been exhibited internationally including digital art retrospectives like the MILAN MACHINIMA FESTIVAL (2019) and Vector Festival (2018), Toronto, Canada.

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In una delle scene più memorabili di Postmortem (Pablo Larrain, 2010), il protagonista Mario (Alfredo Castro), cammina con nonchalance tra mucchi di corpi. Mario è un mero impiegato dell’obitorio di un ospedale che si riempie rapidamente dopo un evento inaspettato. Il suo lavoro consiste nel certificare che la morte delle vittime non è riconducibile al suicidio. Postmortem è ambientato nel settembre 1973, dopo il colpo di stato promosso dalla CIA che culminò con il rovesciamento del presidente democraticamente eletto Salvador Allende e lo sterminio di migliaia di cileni (gli americani non hanno alcun problema ad a intervenire direttamente nelle elezioni di altri paesi nella misura in cui non sono bersagli bensì mandanti dell’”interferenza”: il significato dell’“undici settembre” per i cileni e e per gli statunitensi non coincide).

Viscera Cleanup Detail (Piles) di Chris Kerich è inserito nel ciclo di proiezioni speciali THE CLASSICAL ELEMENTS. Grazie a una durata di circa ottanta minuti è l’opera più lunga tra quelle presentate all’MMF MMXXI. Tuttavia, rappresenta un semplice frammento di un ambizioso progetto intitolato Piles (2018), che consiste in “oltre 22 ore di registrazioni video, trasmesse in live streaming su Twitch dell’accumulo di corpi morti o incoscienti in sette diversi videogiochi: Dishonored: Death of the Outsider, Skyrim, Hitman, Metal Gear Solid V, Viscera Cleanup Detail, Slime Rancher e Tabletop Simulator”. In una video intervista con Gemma Fantacci, Luca Miranda e Riccardo Retez, l’artista americano e dottorando all’Università di Santa Cruz, in California ha discusso la concezione ed evoluzione di un progetto che ha generato una varietà di paratesti, tra cui otto brevi saggi critici pubblicati sul suo sito web. Il ritmo dei vari segmenti di Piles è eclettico e spazia dal frenetico al contemplativo (per esempio, il segmento dedicato a Hitman esemplifica in forma paragidmatica la nozione di “slow machinima”).

Viscera Cleanup Detail (2015) è un gioco di simulazione di pulizie autoreferenziale sviluppato da RuneStorm. Il giocatore assume i panni di un addetto alle pulizie incaricato di sanificare gli spazi in cui hanno avuto luogo sanguinosi scontri a fuoco. In altre parole, l’obiettivo non è sporcare di sangue il pavimento e le pareti, come in un tradizionale sparatutto in soggettiva, ma rimuovere le vittime: corpi, cadaveri, arti e organi. Tuttavia, l’intento dell’artista non coincide con gli obiettivi prefissati dai designer. Come spiega Kerich nel suo testo introduttivo, “In questo video lascio il livello che ho selezionato, Evil Science in uno stato ancora più lercio di quanto non fosse all'inizio. […] Uso il mocio solo per cercare di rimuovere un arto che è bloccato sotto un tavolo e altrimenti sfrutta l’abilità dei custodi nel trasportare oggetti per creare un mucchio di cadaveri”.

Piles è una penetrante riflessione su temi differenti, dall’etica delle meccaniche di gioco alla rappresentazione della morte negli spazi digitali. “Come tutti gli altri corpi che fanno capolino all’interno di questo progetto, la loro funzione meccanica e il loro scopo infrastrutturale definisce la loro rappresentazione e la loro corporeità”, conclude. Se qualcuno s’imbattesse nei video di Kerich online “per sbaglio” — il che non sarebbe facile dato che non sono esplicitamente visualizzati su YouTube e per di più sono “circondati” da informazioni critiche e contestuali — qualcuno potrebbe liquidarli come un esempio di tanti altri video buffi, bizzarri e comici attualmente ospitati su YouTube (la dpcumentazione audiovisiva dell’accumulo dei corpi nei videogiochi rappresenta un vero e proprio genere). Ma a differenza della maggior parte di queste produzioni vernacolari, Piles non fa mistero del proprio sottotesto politico.

Come spiega Kerich,

La risonanza simbolica di un mucchio di corpi in un videogioco è politica. La meccanica sottesa alla costruzione di una pila di corpi in un gioco è politica. L’infrastruttura che governa il modo in cui la rappresentazione estetica si associa alle meccaniche di un videogioco è politica. Chi ha accesso al potere, e di che tipo, all’interno di un videogioco è una questione politica. Chi ha accesso e tempo per videogiocare è una questione politica. Guarda attentamente e non dare nulla per scontato.

In apparenza, tanto il custode invisibile di Viscera Cleanup Detail quanto l’impiegato di Postmortem di Larrain paiono meri ingranaggi all’interno di una macchina mostruosa: l’accumulo dei corpi e la certificazione della loro morte sono un puro gesto burocratico, privo di qualsiasi significato o conseguenza. I due non possono annullare quanto è successo né manifestano alcun interesse a farlo. In un certo senso, sono complici del sistema. Ma è proprio la ripetizione dei loro atti mortificanti — che culmina con l’accumulo coatto di oggetti inanimati e la stesura di certificati di morte — a renderla indistinguibile dall’arte performativa.

Chris Kerich è un programmatore e artista che vive e lavora a Santa Cruz in California. Studia i sistemi — e la loro messa in crisi —, l’arte vincolata, l’informazione, i cultural studies e i videogiochi. Dottorando nel programma in Film & Digital Media presso l’University of California a Santa Cruz, Chris ha ottenuto un Master of Arts presso il Massachusetts Institute of Technology di Boston nel 2017 e una Laurea di Primo Livello presso l’Università Carnegie Mellon nel 2013. Le sue opere sono state presentate a livello internazionale. Ha partecipato a numerose rassegne di digital art, tra cui il MILAN MACHINIMA FESTIVAL (2019) e Vector Festival (2018) di Toronto, in Canada.

NEWS: NICK CROCKETT ON THE AESTHETICS AND POLITICS OF THE ANTHROPOCENE

Nick Crockett

In this interview with Matteo Bittanti, artist and designer Nick Crockett discusses his ambitious multimedia work Fire Underground, which is featured in The Classical Elements program at the 2021 MILAN MACHINIMA FESTIVAL. In this wide-ranging conversation, Crockett talks about the main inspiration behind the project, the challenges he encountered during the production, and what comes next. Fire Underground is a speculative fantasy on the most destructive and criminal industry in human history, the fossil fuel complex. In Crockett’s work, the history of coal mining in the eastern United States is narrated as an animated film developed with a video game engine. Set in a fictional version of Appalachia, Fire Underground was inspired in part by the West Virginia Mine Wars, the Homestead Steel Strike, the Whiskey Rebellion, the early history of paleontology, and Appalachian folk music and culture.

As Crockett explains, 

I began thinking about coal after visiting Centralia, Pennsylvania n the summer of 2017, roughly four hours east from where I live in Pittsburgh. Centralia was a coal town which was slowly destroyed after a seam of coal caught fire below the town. This fire is still burning today, nearly 50 years later. During the presidential election of 2016, coal miners from some of the poorest places in the country entered public consciousness as avatars of an imagined white working class. They appeared on television news channels to confront candidates, pose for photo ops, and talk about the future of their industry, their homes, and their families. They were regarded by pundits variously as hardworking, heroic, backwards, lost, or even dangerous. As I wandered around Centralia, it was hard to reconcile the ruins with all these stories. I found myself wondering how anyone could identify so powerfully with a job that so obviously endangers their home, their families, their own bodies, not to mention the earth’s ecosystems and climate. I also wondered at the ease with which some could vilify people who live in places like Centralia. Mostly, I wondered where all these stories had come from.

Fire Underground has been exhibited as real time software, as a multichannel video installation, and as a feature-length film. It is screened as a fifteen minute cut at the MILAN MACHINIMA FESTIVAL.

Nick Crockett is an artist from a former gold mining town in the foothills of California’s Sierra Nevada mountains who makes experimental games and animation. Nick holds a BA in Design/Media Art from the University of California, Los Angeles and an MFA from the Carnegie Mellon School of Art in Pittsburgh.

The full interview is available here:

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In questa intervista con Matteo Bittanti, l’artista e designer americano Nick Crockett discute del suo ambizioso progetto Fire Underground, incluso nel programma The Classical Elements al MILAN MACHINIMA FESTIVAL 2021. In questa conversazione ad ampio raggio, Crockett illustra l’ispirazione principale alla base del progetto, le sfide che ha incontrato durante la produzione e ciò a cui sta lavorando. Fire Underground è una fantasia speculativa sull’industria più distruttiva e criminale di tutti i tempi: il complesso dei combustibili fossili. Nel lavoro di Crockett, la storia dell’estrazione del carbone negli Stati Uniti è narrata attraverso un racconto animato sviluppato con un motore di videogiochi. Ambientato in una versione immaginaria dell’Appalachia, Fire Underground è stato ispirato in parte dalle guerre minerarie del West Virginia, dall'Homestead Steel Strike, dalla Whiskey Rebellion, dalla storia antica della paleontologia e dalla musica e cultura popolare degli Appalachi.

Come ha spiegato Crockett,

Ho iniziato a riflettere sul carbone dopo aver visitato Centralia, Pennsylvania, nell’estate del 2017, a circa quattro ore a est da dove vivo a Pittsburgh. Centralia era una città carbonifera che fu lentamente distrutta dopo che un giacimento di carbone prese fuoco sotto la città. Questo fuoco brucia ancora oggi, quasi mezzo secolo dopo. Durante le elezioni presidenziali del 2016, i minatori di carbone provenienti da alcuni dei luoghi più poveri del paese sono entrati nella coscienza pubblica come avatar dell’immaginaria classe operaia bianca. Sono apparsi sui network di informazione televisiva per confrontarsi con i candidati, posare per i servizi fotografici e parlare del futuro del loro settore, delle loro case e delle loro famiglie. Erano considerati dagli esperti in vario modo come laboriosi, eroici, arretrati, persi o addirittura pericolosi. Mentre giravo per Centralia, era difficile conciliare le rovine con tutte queste storie. Mi sono ritrovato a chiedermi come qualcuno potesse identificarsi in modo così potente con un lavoro che mette in così evidente pericolo la loro casa, le loro famiglie, i loro stessi corpi, per non parlare degli ecosistemi e del clima della terra. Mi sono anche chiesto con quale facilità alcuni potrebbero denigrare le persone che vivono in posti come Centralia. Per lo più, mi chiedevo da dove provenissero tutte queste storie…

Fire Underground è stato presentato come software in tempo reale, come installazione video multicanale e come lungometraggio. È esibito come un cortometraggio di quindici minuti al MILAN MACHINIMA FESTIVAL.

Nick Crockett è un artista originario di una cittadina situata ai piedi dell’arco montuoso della Sierra Nevada in California, specializzato nella produzione di videogiochi sperimentali e animazioni digitali. Crockett ha conseguito una laurea in Design/Media Art presso l’Università della California, Los Angeles e un MFA presso la Carnegie Mellon School of Art di Pittsburgh.

L’intervista è disponibile qui (in inglese):

NEWS: INTRODUCING THE FIFTH ELEMENT

The MILAN MACHINIMA FESTIVAL is proud to present Cade Mirabitur’s The Long Fall in its special screening series The Classical Elements: in this short machinima, bodies and objects chaotically collide in a small house as it plummets down a deep hole. The sudden implosion of domesticity evoke the state of uncertainty and meaningless of the world we live in: randomness is the universe’s quintessence, the fifth element. Created using Valve’s popular Garry’s Mod (2004) during the first COVID-19 lockdown, The Long Fall was originally screened at Slamdance 2021.

Cade Mirabitur is twenty year old American filmmaker from Detroit, Michigan. He mainly experiments with filmmaking techniques and technology that limit cinematic creation to only its essentials, yielding a bare and unique final product. Recurring themes in his films include time, death, technology, and decay. He directed several short films including Soap (2020), The Answer (2019), and Yellowcake (2019).

Click here to watch the movie

Il MILAN MACHINIMA FESTIVAL è orgoglioso di presentare The Long Fall di Cade Mirabitur nella serie di proiezioni speciali The Classical Elements: in questo breve machinima corpi e oggetti si scontrano caoticamente in una piccola abitazione mentre precipita in un buco profondo. L'improvvisa implosione della domesticità evoca lo stato di incertezza e insignificante del mondo in cui viviamo: la casualità permea lo spazio, è la quintessenza dell’universo, il quinto elemento. Creato utilizzando il popolare Garry’s Mod (Valve, 2004) durante il primo blocco del COVID-19, The Long Fall fa parte della selezione ufficiale di Slamdance 2021.

Cade Mirabitur è un regista americano ventenne di Detroit, Michigan. Sperimenta principalmente con tecniche e tecnologie di produzione cinematografica che limitano la creazione cinematografica solo ai suoi elementi essenziali, ottenendo un prodotto finale spoglio e unico. I temi ricorrenti nei suoi film includono il tempo, la morte, la tecnologia e il decadimento. Ha diretto numerosi cortometraggi, tra cui Soap (2020), The Answer (2019) e Yellowcake (2019).

Il machinima è disponibile qui.