First Italian Conference on In-Game Photography/Primo convegno italiano sulla fotoludica
Thursday March 14 and Friday March 15 2024, 10 AM - 1 PM
Sala dei 146, IULM 6
Università IULM
Via Carlo Bo, 2 20143 Milano
In English and Italian
Free entry/Ingresso libero— advance registration is recommended/prenotazione consigliata
contact: Matteo Bittanti matteo.bittanti@iulm.it
Videos
Talks, Thursday March 14 2024
Talks, Friday March 15 2024
Interviews, Friday March 15 2024
Schedule
Thursday March 14 2024
09.45 Registration
10.00 Matteo Bittanti, opening remarks
10.20 Marco De Mutiis, Playable Imaging: Photography in, as, and against games
11:00 Kieran Nolan, Graffiti photo archiving in and through video games
11:20 Florence Smith Nicholls, Memory full: Video game photography as digital archaeology
11:40 Panel discussion and Q&A moderated by Marco De Mutiis
12:00 Gina Hara, Speculative photography in Minecraft. Minecraft’s allegorical potential in architectural exploration
12:20 Adonis Archontides, Taskmasters no more: Subverting playbour through artistic play
12.40 Joseph DeLappe and Laura Leuzzi, Head Shot! Artefacts of interventionist play: Joseph DeLappe’s extended screenshots
13:00 Panel discussion and Q&A moderated by Matteo Bittanti
Friday March 15 2024
09.45 Registration
10.00 Matteo Bittanti, opening remarks
10.20 Marco De Mutiis, Photographing the game glitch: Between ghost photography and immaterial labour
10.40 Simone Santilli, Galactic Mine. Photography and extractivism in No Man’s Sky’s procedural universe
11:00 Angelo Careri, Boris Camaca’s Memories of Territory: deconstructing landscape photography in Red Dead Redemption 2
11:20 Ivan Girina, Framing Video Game Agency: Down and Out in Los Santos and In-Game Photography as Subversive Play
11:40 Pascal Greco, Face(s) Place(s)
12.00 Panel discussion and Q&A moderated by Marco De Mutiis
12.20 Gabriele Aroni, Who owns the (virtual) view? The copyright boundaries of digital games
12.40 Leonardo Magrelli, Ah shit, here we go again
13:00 Riccardo Reina, Teaching through the lens: Photographic gameplay from snapshots to storytelling
13.20 Panel discussion and Q&A moderated by Matteo Bittanti
Talks and biographies
Adonis Archontides, Taskmasters no more: Subverting playbor through artistic play
In this talk, digital artist Adonis Archontides will discuss his ongoing photographic documentation of video game worlds, situating it as an artistic interrogation of labor, agency and immersion while gaming. He will explore several related projects including Postcards from Quarantine and #roadtrip, tracing an evolution in his conceptual approach. Comparing the sense of familiarity and possibility when revisiting these spaces to the state of “flow”, Archontides will outline notions of gaming as artistic meta-labor. He will also critique mechanics-driven photo modes as diminishing organic expression, instead finding value in subverting prescribed game systems to enable self-directed play. Ultimately Archontides will reflect on the resonance created between digital exploration and artistic questioning, spaces where potent ideas around cultural literacy, commodification of activity and the pursuit of meaningful engagement continue to unfold.
Adonis Archontides is a conceptual artist based in Limassol, Cyprus, whose multimedia practice investigates notions of identity, mythmaking, and the porous boundaries between reality and fiction. He holds a degree in Illustration and Visual Media from the University of the Arts London. His works blend photography, digital media, performance, and sculpture to satirize and introspect on the conscious and unconscious ways we construct selfhood. Archontides’s research revolves around his namesake Adonis — the ancient Greek deity of vegetation and desire — exploring how the effects of time reshape the interpretation of myths. As an avid gamer, he also leverages the artistic potential of video games, using simulated environments as raw material to interrogate ideas around agency and purpose. Most recently, Archontides has been collaborating with an avatar of himself he created in The Sims 4. This episodic work juxtaposes the classic hero’s journey with the chaotic trajectory of a contemporary artistic career. Merging gameplay and staged social media documentation, the project asks probing questions about ambition, success, and finding meaning when living between blurred realities.
Gabriele Aroni, Who owns the (virtual) view? The copyright boundaries of digital games
While most jurisdictions protect digital games under copyright, some argue players create proprietary content too. With in-game photography’s rise, players are no longer passive viewers but dynamic participants shaping scenes. Yet these images depend on developer-authored assets and software systems. Thus games could be considered “authoring tools” like word processors or 3D modelers. So while screenshots constitute player-generated content, they appropriate materials and platforms authored by developers. This raises a legal conundrum: are players sole owners of derivative creations provided they demonstrate originality? Or do developers retain rights, with screenshots qualifying as derivative works requiring licensing permission? In other words, what are copyright’s limits regarding player-produced screenshots built from protected games?
Gabriele Aroni is Senior Lecturer in Game Arts at the School of Digital Arts of Manchester Metropolitan University in the UK. Trained as an architect, he pursued his studies in digital media and communication. His research is situated at the intersection of architecture, game studies, cultural heritage, and semiotics, and his publications space from architectural history and semiotics, to the aesthetics of digital games and copyright law. He is the author of The Semiotics of Architecture in Video Games (Bloomsbury, 2022) and Gli ordini architettonici di San Lorenzo a Firenze (Mimesis, 2016).
Angelo Careri, Boris Camaca’s Memories of Territory: deconstructing landscape photography in Red Dead Redemption 2
Digital playgrounds like Red Dead Redemption 2 showcase ornate frontiers and sanctioned vistas, yet pervading conventions narrowly contour such virtual tourism. Player-photographers frequently either glorify mythic Wild West motifs or explicitly critique immersive illusions. Boris Camaca’s photo series Memories of Territory demonstrates a third approach, adopting a tourist gaze yet generating oblique, atmospheric images largely drained of period signifiers. Frame by frame, simulated nature sheds its Edenic skin, exposing liminal spaces evoking intimate emotional states beyond the declarative. As Baltrusaitis wrote, even utopian gardens cast shadows. Can photographs rendered from coded domains reveal interior qualities through poetic opacity rather than efforts at transparency? Exploring this premise, Careri argues that instead of seeking impossible escape, artistic subjectivity may derive from aware yet oblique gazes upon game worlds’ conscribed domains.
French writer and scholar Angelo Careri wears varied professional hats across education, publishing, and the arts. He serves as co-founder and chief editor of the gaming and art magazine Immersion, through which Careri spearheads thoughtful conversations around aesthetics and technology. Formerly a lecturer of French literature at the Paris Sorbonne, he teaches Game Art course at Ecoles des Arts Décoratifs de Paris (ENSAD) while organizing events engaging with digital gaming as an artistic medium. Whether analyzing lines of code or verse, this multi-talented renaissance figure brings both humanistic rigor and avant-garde verve to examining modalities of play across both analog and digital domains.
Ivan Girina, Framing Video Game Agency: Down and Out in Los Santos and In-Game Photography as Subversive Play
In this talk, scholar Ivan Girina will discuss expanded concepts of agency in video games, looking beyond the interactivity afforded by developers. Using the art project Down and Out in Los Santos as a case study, Girina will show how in-game photography can subvert the procedural rhetoric of blockbuster games like GTA V. He will analyze how still images expose forms of structural violence in these game worlds, contesting their spectacular action to bring marginalized subjects and ideology into view. Drawing on theories of play as disruptive and destabilizing, Girina will argue for understanding player agency as an unruly force negotiated across the entire game ecosystem. He will discuss creative practices like mods and machinima as ways players stake authorial claims within virtual corporate spaces. Ultimately Girina will make the case for subversive play opening new pathways for intervention in game cultures, rerouting the logic codified by developers to more diverse spaces for meaning-making.
Ivan Girina is a Senior Lecturer in Game Studies and holds a PhD in Film and Television Studies from the University of Warwick, his research is currently focused on digital games asethetic, particualrly its relationship with cinema and larger visual media landscapes. Ivan is also co-founder and member of the Editorial Board of the international academic journal G|A|M|E – Games as Art, Media and Entertainment. He has published on a variety of topics such as: cinematic games; video game agency; film and new media; media literacy and education; and Italian regional cinema.
Pascal Greco, Face(s) Place(s)
In March 2020, photographer Pascal Greco had planned to travel to Iceland to continue his photographic project “No Cliché,” which aimed to portray unique images of this oft-photographed country. However, due to the onset of the COVID-19 pandemic and subsequent travel restrictions, he was unable to embark on this journey. During lockdown, Greco discovered the PlayStation 4 game Death Stranding, whose stark yet beautiful rendered landscapes evoked Iceland’s volcanic terrain. This serendipitous discovery led Greco to pivot his project and begin capturing screenshots of Death Stranding as if they were photographs. In this talk, the Swiss-Italian filmmaker will chronicle how an unexpected twist led to a new creative direction for his Iceland photographic project. He will outline the original goals of “No Cliché” and discuss his initial disappointment at being unable to travel to Iceland. However, the visual parallels between the game and the country soon became apparent, offering an inventive solution. Greco will delve into his process of photographing Death Stranding, evaluating compositional choices and post-processing techniques to convey the feeling of being present in Iceland. He will reflect on how limitations can spur creative growth, concluding that channeling one vision into an entirely new form can bring surprises that reinvigorate an artistic practice. The talk will be accompanied by Greco’s unique video game landscape photographs of a virtual Iceland.
Pascal Greco, a Swiss-Italian filmmaker, cinematographer, and photographer from Geneva, stands out for his innovative work in video game photography, particularly through Place(s), a project merging virtual landscapes with real-world imagery. This venture, acclaimed by media like The Guardian and Vice, showcases Greco’s skill in blending digital and physical realms. His filmography includes the poetic Super 8 (2008) and the contemplative trilogy concluding with Stun (2015). The Scavengers, his documentary on Hong Kong’s elderly, was featured at Geneva’s International Film Festival on Human Rights in 2019. Greco also co-founded the ELAN collective, aimed at empowering young and marginalized individuals through film and video game projects, highlighting his dedication to social integration. His work in video game photography not only demonstrates his artistic versatility but also his engagement with innovative mediums and social causes.
Marco De Mutiis, Playable Imaging: Photography in, as, an against games
Playable imaging investigates the tensions arising from the combination of play and image-making, in phenomena like in-game photography. The presentation will examine production and circulation of game images within contemporary discourses of digital and networked images, while mapping different notions of play that shape the act of image-making within larger social, political and economic contexts.
Marco De Mutiis, Photographing the game glitch: Between ghost photography and immaterial labour
This presentation explores the properties of glitch within practices of in-game photography. It argues that in-game photography capturing the breaking of game textures and graphics reveals the process of creation of photorealism and the remediation of traditional photography within digital and playable spaces. On the other hand, it proposes that screenshotting game glitches acts as an involuntary bug report and part of an economy of ever-optimizing networked images.
Marco De Mutiis is a Digital Curator at Fotomuseum Winterthur in Switzerland where he leads the museum research on algorithmic and networked forms of vision and image-making. He leads and co-curates different projects and platforms expanding the role and the space of the museum. These include the collaborative live stream programme Screen Walks (developed and co-curated with Jon Uriarte, curator of digital programmes at The Photographers’ Gallery in London), as well as Fotomuseum’s current experimental platform [permanent beta] The Lure of the Image. He is a researcher and doctoral candidate at the Centre for the Study of the Networked Image at South Bank University where he focuses on the relationship between computer games and photography. He co-curated with Matteo Bittanti the group exhibition How to Win at Photography – Image-making as Play, exploring the photographic act through the act of play and the notion of games. He has written, edited and contributed to several publications, including the recent book Screen Images – In-Game Photography, Screenshot, Screencast (co-edited with Winfried Gerling and Sebastian Möring). He is part of the artist duo 2girls1comp with Alexandra Pfammatter and his artworks have been shown internationally in galleries and festivals. He lectures and teaches regularly in different institutions and schools, including Master Photography at ECAL and Camera Arts at Lucerne University of Applied Arts and Design.
Gina Hara, Speculative photography in Minecraft. Minecraft’s allegorical potential in architectural exploration
This talk delves into the intersections of Minecraft, 1960s architectural photography, and the visionary concepts of the Fun Palace. As part of the Material Allegories and Minecraft research project (Simon, Wershler, et al.), Gina Hara’s in-game photography explores how Minecraft serves as a canvas for reinterpreting the ethos of post-WWII architectural visionaries, notably in the context of the Fun Palace envisioned by Price and Littlewood. Drawing upon insights from new media art, filmmaking, and game studies, this project challenges conventional interpretations of video games as mere texts for analysis. Hara illustrates the significance of in-game photography as a theory of play and creation, emphasizing the allegorical potential inherent in gaming experiences.
Gina Hara is a Hungarian-Canadian filmmaker and artist. She holds an MA in Intermedia, an MFA in Film Production and worked with film, video, new media, gaming, and design. Waning (2011), her first fiction film, was nominated for a Best Canadian Short award at the Toronto International Film Festival. Your Place or Minecraft (2016), a machinima web series focusing on game studies, is currently available on YouTube. Hara’s full length documentary Geek Girls (2017) explores the notion of subculture from women’s perspective and was screened internationally, including IULM University in 2018 during the Gender Play conference. Her artworks have been exhibited by several institutions including the New Museum in New York, the Budapest Kunsthalle and the City of Montreal.
Joseph DeLappe, Laura Leuzzi, Head Shot! Artefacts of interventionist play: Joseph DeLappe’s extended screenshots
In this joint talk, Laura Leuzzi and Joseph DeLappe will discuss DeLappe’s pioneering performance art within game spaces and how the visual documentation of these works problematizes representations of violence. They will explore several of DeLappe’s projects including dead-in-iraq, Quake/Friends and others, analyzing both the creation of the performances themselves as well as the critical role played by the production of screenshots, 3D captures and physical artifacts. The talk will trace how DeLappe’s practice sits in relation to traditions of war photography and photojournalism, arguing that the images fill an important gap while also taking on activist meaning. Leuzzi and DeLlappe will also examine how such game-derived images, slipping fluidly between the real and the virtual, take on a distinct potency in relation to the original events.
Joseph DeLappe is an internationally exhibited and collected artist, activist and educator based in Dundee, Scotland, where he holds the post of Professor of Games and Tactical Media at Abertay University. Working across electronic and digital media since 1983, DeLappe’s pioneering performance artworks, sculptures and electromechanical installations interrogate pressing social and political issues. Blurring the lines between the physical and virtual, his practice probes the spaces where human action confronts systems of power. Venues that have hosted his works include Eyebeam Art and Technology, New York; the Guangdong Museum of Art, China; the Southern Utah Museum of Art; and Transitio MX, Mexico City. His works are held in various public collections and have been widely discussed in scholarly journals and the popular press, including the New York Times, The Guardian, BBC, Art in America and more. DeLappe has contributed to several edited collections and co-edited the 2023 book “INCITE: Digital Art and Activism” (Peacock Visual Arts). His most recent authored chapter is titled “Me and My Predator(s): Tactical Remembrance and Critical Atonement, Drone Aesthetics: War, Culture, Ecology” (Open Humanities Press, 2022). Relocating from the USA to Scotland in 2017, DeLappe leverages his role within academia to foster radical pedagogies and transfer knowledge across disciplines, generations and geographies, situating tactical media as a potent site for confronting injustice and enacting positive social change.
Laura Leuzzi is a renowned contemporary art historian, curator, and author, with a PhD in “Tools and Methods for the History of Art,” focusing on Contemporary Art from Sapienza Università di Roma in 2011. Her expertise lies in early video art, art and feminism, and new media. Currently, she is a Research Fellow and Co-Investigator on the AHRC-funded project Richard Demarco: The Italian Connection at DJCAD, University of Dundee, highlighting her role in exploring significant cultural intersections. Additionally, she contributes as a Co-Investigator on the RSE-funded Digital Art and Activism project (2019-2021), demonstrating her commitment to the intersections between digital media, art, and societal change. Leuzzi’s editorial work includes co-editing REWIND Early Video Art in Italy/I primi anni della videoarte in Italia (John Libbey Publishing, 2015), a pivotal publication launched across various venues. Her curatorial projects focus on video art, with notable exhibitions such as REWINDItalia at VideoEX (Zurich 2014) and Unter de Himmel vo Züri (Under Zurich’s sky) screened at ZHdK University of Arts Zurich in 2016. Since 2016, she has served on the Curatorial Board of the Rome Media Art Festival, marking her as a key figure in media art. Leuzzi’s work bridges historical perspectives with contemporary issues in art and feminism, underscoring her significant contributions to contemporary visual culture.
Leonardo Magrelli, Ah shit, here we go again
Leonardo Magrelli chronicles an artistic interrogation of Grand Theft Auto V’s intricately constructed Los Santos, a meticulous yet uncanny duplicate of Los Angeles. Incited by nostalgia, Magrelli amassed player-created screenshots shared online, intrigued by their inadvertent echoes of classic California photographic tropes. Manipulating and sequencing these overlooked fragments as shrewd appropriation art, his project West of Here took the form of a photographic book deceptively positioned as documentary survey of the American West. By converting images intended purely as tactical gaming assets into an alternative reality faithfully mimicking esteemed photographic lineages, Magrelli explores profound ambivalences of the medium while addressing themes of simulation, mapping, excavation and horizons of possibility within virtual spaces. Where does the eye land once we reach the edge of the game map? What forgotten memories and images have accumulated in the substrata of video game territories built, destroyed, rebuilt? Delving the palimpsestic terrain, Magrelli provokes urgent questions through remixed visions perhaps best categorized as glitches in time.
After studying Design and Art History, Leonardo Magrelli embarked on graphic and book design, fields fostering an openness to image manipulation that still permeates his art. Converting to photography, characteristics of research-driven conceptualism blended with descriptive precision remain visible across projects alternating between strict documentation and more oblique visual storytelling. An awareness of photography’s innate ambiguities forms an undercurrent throughout Magrelli’s practice. Works waver between deadpan captures apparently void of authorship and highly subjective, ironic commentaries indirectly questioning the medium’s veracity. Questions of visual fact versus fiction culminate in his project West of Here, a photographic chronicle of Grand Theft Auto V’s uncanny duplicate Los Santos landscape derived from obscure online fragments. Masterfully sequenced, the project took the form of a travelogue faithfully — yet falsely — mapping the quintessential American West. Based in Rome, Magrelli continues probing photography’s past promises and future challenges through work foregrounding sites where artifice risks eclipse.
Florence Smith Nicholls, Memory full: Video game photography as digital archaeology
Photography is a well-established technique for recording analogue archaeological sites and artefacts, with conventions of best practice. This talk will explore how photography can provide a visual record for digital archaeologies of video games using several case studies from my own research. This includes archaeological surveys of Elden Ring and NieR:Automata, in which I took a more formalised approach to photography. I will contrast this with my own personal archive of game screenshots, arguing that these constitute a different kind of intimate digital archaeology.
Florence Smith Nicholls, a PhD student at Queen Mary University of London, merges their archaeology background with game AI research, focusing on generative archaeology games. These games, featuring procedurally generated content, encourage archaeological recording by players. Florence’s work extends to examining games like Elden Ring and Nier: Automata through an archaeological lens, contributing to the discourse on game preservation, AI ethics, and procedural narratives. They also explore queer perspectives in gaming and have worked as a narrative designer, including a stint in the writers’ room at Die Gute Fabrik and a project at the British Library focusing on narrative mobile apps. Recognized as a member of The Game Awards Future Class 2022, Florence's research and contributions significantly impact game studies and preservation.
Kieran Nolan, Graffiti photo archiving in and through video games
This essay explores synergies between graffiti’s reappropriation of surfaces and photographic image creation both of and within game environments. Author Kiean Nolan examines varied in-game photography techniques, assessing adaptations of lens-based capture for direct recording off screens, approximate simulations of photography encoded into digital spaces, and importing real-world images into malleable game engines. This analysis intertwines with discussion of graffiti and street art aesthetics flowering in these virtual sandboxes. Just as urban artists hijack allscapes as creative canvases, so too hacker-explorers of emergent game possibilities circumvent programmed constraints to generate novel photographic possibilities. Ultimately, the ethos of autogenerative creation through insightful system penetration links tagger and screenshot archivist in a shared quest to make the mediated realm their own.
Kieran Nolan is a Lecturer in Creative Media at Dundalk Institute of Technology, and Co-Director of DkIT’s Creative Arts Research Centre. His PhD “The Art, Aesthetics, and Materiality of the Arcade Video game Interface” (Trinity College Dublin, 2019) combined art and design-based research, platform studies and media archaeology. Kieran’s art practice explores the aesthetic and connective properties of games, interfaces, and networked media. He is currently researching Ireland’s pre-digital game manufacturing history, arcade gaming in anime and manga, and the links between videogames and graffiti art.
Riccardo Reina, Teaching through the lens: Photographic gameplay as core experience
As games pursue heightened visual verisimilitude, photo modes have become standard inclusions, satisfying user desire to showcase creativity while easing technical hurdles. Yet some titles go further, structuring core mechanics around photographic principles for immersive gameplay. Moving beyond superficial snapshot features, these experiences transform real-world camera techniques into engines of narrative and discovery. In this presentation, developer and designer Riccardo Reina surveys notable games leveraging photography beyond surface documentation, analyzing their instructional and experiential impacts. From compositional awareness to mastering aperture controls, players gain tangible skills while unpacking symbolic resonances tied to lighting, perspective and time. Reina argues that photographic gameplay mechanisms thus expand the medium’s expressive range and transforming users into more thoughtful image-makers.
Currently with award-winning studio Santa Ragione, Reina is a narrative designer on acclaimed independent titles including Saturnalia, Horses and Mediterranea Inferno. His depth of professional photography and camera operation experience across commercials, TV and fashion deeply informs his game design practice and research connecting immersive worlds with visual literacy. Riccardo lives and work in Milan.
Simone Santilli, Galactic Mine. Photography and extractivism in No Man’s Sky procedural universe
Simone Santilli investigates intertwined photographic and extractionist operations within the procedurally-generated space of No Man’s Sky. This talk inspects how the game’s core colonialist themes enable yet exploit user photography. Players shoot to extract: resources disintegrate under guns-as-cameras. Yet shooting also produces virtual screenshots as shareable trophies. These images gain currency as players construct a sprawling apparatus mapping assets across quintillion planets. Though alien vistas entrance through visual abundance, instrumental photographic regimes locate unfurled terrain and broadcast productive claims over admiring sights. Worldmaking and image-sharing interlock, transforming gamespace into a metastasizing network circumscribing even perpetually-regenerating wilds through quantification. Player photographs become prospecting instruments, promising coordinates to the next payload. Ultimately, Santilli provocatively frames No Man’s Sky as a counter-earth where photography’s historical role surveying terrain for appropriation and profit plays out on an operatic interstellar scale.
Multidisciplinary artist and educator Simone Santilli investigates friction points generated by humanity’s fraught image entanglements. As a lecturer at NABA Milan and Course Leader for the BA in Visual Arts at MADE Program Siracusa, Sicily, he bridges theory and practice across mediums. Santilli’s photography, video, installations and writings critically examine how images mediate self-identity and collective memory. Often incorporating iconic imagery from politics, advertising and entertainment media, his work surfaces underlying ideological forces that shape perception. He is author of My Favourite Game (Postmedia Books, 2023), the first Italian book focused on video game photography as an emergent art form. Analyzing player communities and photography mechanics across titles, Santilli considers complex dynamics of appropriation, exploitation and creativity tied to virtual image-making.
video banner: 2girls1comp, Towards a Philosophy of the Photo Daddy, 2023, Courtesy of 2girls1comp