EVENT: VRAL IRL_ALEKSANDAR RADAN (NOVEMBER 24 2023, MILAN, ITALY)

Join us on Friday November 24 2023 at 6 PM at IULM University, in Milan, Italy for an exclusive artist talk by Alexandar Radan. This event marks the launch of VRAL IRL because time has come to touch grass.

VRAL IRL_ ALEKSANDAR RADAN

Room 613, floor -1, Building IULM 6

IULM University

Via Carlo Bo 2

20143 Milan

Italy

THE EVENT IS FREE AND OPEN TO THE PUBLIC: PLEASE RSVP

Aleksandar Radan, born in Offenbach am Main in 1988, completed his studies in art at the Hochschule für Gestaltung in Offenbach. His artistic focus lies in the realm of digital media, with particular emphasis on video games, which he appropriates, manipulates, and subverts. Central to Radan’s body of work are themes that explore the unpredictable ruptures within meticulously designed systems, the aesthetics of simulation, and the evolving role of the artist in the age of algorithms. His diverse artistic practice encompasses experimental film and video, installation art, and performance. Radan’s works have received recognition at prestigious venues, including the Clermont-Ferrand International Short Film Festival and the International Short Film Festival in Oberhausen.

Questo evento è primo appuntamento della serie VRAL IRL, perché è arrivato il momento di toccare l’erba.

L'EVENTO È GRATUITO E APERTO AL PUBBLICO PREVIA REGISTRAZIONE

VRAL IRL_ ALEKSANDAR RADAN

Aula 613, piano -1, IULM 6

Università IULM

Via Carlo Bo, 2

20143 Milano

Aleksandar Radan nato a Offenbach am Main nel 1988, ha completato gli studi artistici presso la Hochschule für Gestaltung di Offenbach. La sua pratica artistica si concentra sul regno dei media digitali, con particolare attenzione ai videogiochi, di cui si appropria, per manipolarli e sovvertirli. Radan esplora le imprevedibili rotture all’interno di sistemi meticolosamente progettati, glitch e crash, l’estetica della simulazione e il ruolo dell’artista nell'era degli algoritmi. Le sue opere comprendono film e video sperimentali, installazioni e performance. Le opere di Radan hanno ricevuto riconoscimenti in sedi prestigiose, tra cui il Festival internazionale del cortometraggio di Clermont-Ferrand e il Festival internazionale del cortometraggio di Oberhausen.

NEWS: SARA SADIK FOR BMW

Sara Sadik, courtesy of BMW Group

Marseille-based artist Sara Sadik will introduce a e film and a video game specifically designed for BMW i5, debuting at the iconic KOKO venue in Camden Town. Curated by Attilia Fattori Franchini, this pioneering multi-platform endeavor merges art, technology, and design.

The unveiling of both works is scheduled during Frieze London, a vibrant event taking place from October 11th to 15th, 2023. This year's edition of the fair marks its 20th anniversary, promising an international flair and a rich array of cultural partnerships and events, including the BMW Open Work program.

Sara Sadik's artistic expression lies at the crossroads of fiction and documentary. Drawing inspiration from video games, anime, science fiction, and French rap, the artist crafts transformative narratives centered around characters on quests for moral and physical evolution. She has produced groundbreaking machinima among others. Her commission for Frieze London encompasses an interactive playable game, exclusively designed for the all-new, fully electric BMW i5 in collaboration with experts from BMW Gaming and Innovation Lab. Additionally, a video installation will grace the exterior of KOKO as well as the BMW Lounge. Collaborating with BMW i5 designers, Sadik will infuse technical ingenuity into the game’s conception, enhancing the in-car gaming experience through elements like sound and light.

Entitled LA POTION (EH), Sadik's commission employs computer-generated scenarios to delve into the fluctuating emotional states of young male characters. Her world-building techniques render emotions visible while exploring the nuances of masculinity, its ethical and moral frameworks, and the insights it offers into broader societal structures.

Following in the footsteps of Nikita Gale (2022), Madeline Hollander (2020-21), Camille Blatrix (2019), Sam Lewitt (2018), and Olivia Erlanger (2017), Sadik joins the roster of artists chosen for the BMW Open Work initiative, an example of corporate-sponsor art which has been addressed in the past by the likes of COLL.EO (see Carjacked). In 2022, the Milan Machinima Festival screened Sadik’s work Khtobtogone.

MMF MMXXIII UPDATE: A CHAT WITH RHETT TSAI/YUXIAO CAI

PATREON-EXCLUSIVE CONTENT

〰️

PATREON-EXCLUSIVE CONTENT 〰️

The Milan Machinima Festival is proud to present Rhett Tsa/Yuxiao Cai’s, How Deep Is the Dark Water?, an immersive exploration of the complexities of war within the medium of experimental video games.

Born in Ningde, China in 1995, Rhett Tsai (Yuxiao Cai) is a new media artist and experimental game developer, hailing from Hangzhou, China. His work explores the intersection of art and technology, cyberculture based on China, smart cities, and hypertext, all within the unique context of China's Internet ecosystem and media society. Drawing on his multidisciplinary background in experimental game, virtual reality, computer animation, and sound, his work offers a critical reflection on the contemporary media landscape. The artist’s current focus is on video games as a means to evoke the diaspora, wandering, and nostalgia experienced by individuals living under multiple historical narratives.

Matteo Bittanti discussed How Deep Is the Dark Water?, with Rhett Tsai/Yuxiao Cai. Below is an excerpt:

Matteo Bittanti: By utilizing a first-person perspective in your work, you create a sense of immediacy that aligns with Bolter and Grusin’s theories of remediation. However, the repeated use of zooming disrupts any semblance of realism, resulting in a hypermediated effect. Can you speak more about your use of these different forms of mediation, and how they relate to the themes and ideas you are exploring?

Rhett Tsai (Yuxiao Cai): The first-person perspective means that the viewer or player is a character in the work: he is chasing a fleeing man. But who is the viewer, really? A soldier who is trying to kill everyone? The brother of the fleeing man? A war correspondent? The soul of the fleeing man himself? Or an outsider trying to do something in multidimensional time and space? It’s open-ended. I actually had an answer for myself, but I knew it wasn’t the only answer, so I chose to erase the identity of the viewer’s character and leave it up to everyone to guess.

Matteo Bittanti: Your work makes striking use of black and white imagery, which brings to mind not only the aesthetic traditions of art photography and experimental cinema, but also the idea of memory, as this visual convention is often used in film to evoke a temporal dimension that precedes the present moment. Can you elaborate on the reasons behind your choice to work in black and white, and how you incorporate subtle hints of color into this monochromatic palette? 

Rhett Tsai (Yuxiao Cai): I wanted to create a distorted sense of historical perspective. Many of the imagery in the work (such as bomb shelters) are no longer visually impressive to the inhabitants of some areas of the world today, however, if they are black and white then this will evoke a sense of resonance. As for those subtle hints of color that appear in the monochromatic palette, for one thing, it is an aesthetic consideration: to make the visual avoid monotony, and for another, it can be interpreted in multiple dimensions in terms of meaning: things from a different time and space, key clues in the scene, and objects to be viewed in anticipation of becoming close-ups, which is an attempt to get the players to actively perform the act of cinematic close-ups.

(continues)

Matteo Bittanti

Work cited

Rhett Tsai (Yuxiao Cai)

How Deep is the Dark Water?

machinima/digital video, color, sound, 16’ 26”, China

---

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

EVENT: MATTHIEU CHERUBINI (FEBRUARY 4 - 17 2022, ONLINE)

36,000 FEET

Digital video, color, sound, 7’36”, 2021, Switzerland 

Created by Matthieu Cherubini

36,000 feet is a video game set aboard a commercial plane flying over Afghanistan. As a passenger returning to his country from a holiday abroad, the player can watch blockbuster movies such as American Sniper on his in-flight entertainment display or chat with other passengers. The topics of their conversations range from terrorism to the “end of France”, whether Obama is Osama and how the West is currently living under a “terrible dictatorship”. 36,000 feet was developed with Unreal Engine 4, MetaHumans and Blender. This single channel video showcases some salient conversations and is meant as a standalone piece.  

Matthieu Cherubini is a Swiss designer. After studying software engineering and media art/design, between 2012-2015, Cherubini joined a Doctorate program in the Design Interactions department at the Royal College of Art. His research examines the implications of artificial moral agents on mundane events and everyday lives, both today and in the near future. His projects have been exhibited at several international venues, including the Centre Pompidou (France), ZKM (Germany), the V&A Museum (United Kingdom), the Vitra Design Museum (Germany), the Mori Art Museum (Japan), the House of Electronic Arts (Switzerland), and the Nam June Paik Art Center (South Korea). Cherubini is currently working and living in Beijing, China.

WATCH NOW

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

EVENT: VRAL #15_ANTOINE CHAPON (DECEMBER 11 - DECEMBER 24 2020)

MY OWN LANDSCAPES

Digital video (1920 x 1080), color, sound, 18’, 2020 (France)

Created by Antoine Chapon, 2020

Introduced by Luca Miranda

Warfare is being gamified. The American army has been recruiting soldiers through video games since the early zeroes: America’s Army is, after all, the title of a popular video game. Recruits are trained with digital simulations and use game-like controllers to launch countless attack strikes via drones in remote lands: systemic murder by proxy. Even soldiers fighting on actual battlefields cannot escape the video game curse: those suffering from post-traumatic stress disorder are subsequently treated with digital simulations. But in My Own Landscapes, Chapon tells a different story: Cyrille creates and inhabits a virtual island, an utopian landscape where the soldier and his peers can escape reality, find illusory solace, and create a different identity: in fact, his experience is narrated by a female voiceover. Nevertheless, many paradoxes remain.

Antoine Chapon is a French artist and filmmaker based in Paris. He studied fine art, philosophy and social studies. In 2019, he learned literary Arabic at the Saint-Joseph University in Beirut. His work questions the relationship between fact and fiction, the role of the archive, and new technologies in documentary, and the possibility of making new forms in the age of digital reproduction. He has participated in numerous group exhibitions including Open Codes: The World as a Field of Data at the ZKM, Karlsruhe Museum. His first film My Own Landscapes (2020) won the award for best short film at the Visions du Réel Festival in Nyon, and the award for best short documentary film at the Norwegian Short Film Festival. It was also presented at the 2020 Torino Film Festival.

WATCH NOW