For MOV, Nicholas O'Brien has curated a selection of videos that use game engines in their production. Whether creating 3D worlds in commercial software, recording game play, or appropriating 3D design informed by game design, the artists in the screening question how games and simulated spaces are changing our understanding of self, nature, and truth.
Program
Peggy Ahwesh "Lessons of War" (USA)
“Intrigued by a Taiwanese company that makes short animations to relay world news, I downloaded 50 or so and re-edited them into episodes about the 2014 Israeli-Gaza war. The “cuteness effect” of the cartoon form, and the buffer it allows from reality, makes for economical and stress-free viewing. We get the information in an abstract and simplified form, easy to convey the narrative of war with a post-image sensitivity to the viewer.” – Peggy Ahwesh
Theo Triantafyllidis "Radicalization Pipeline" (Greece)
Two seemingly endless hordes clash into a violent free-for-all, swinging large melee weapons and shouting with distorted voices. A wide range of characters -from citizen militias to fantastical creatures -enter the screen only to kill each other, wave after wave, sinking their virtual bodies slowly into a muddy landscape. The mood occasionally lightens up by the medieval covers of familiar pop songs that complete the soundscape conceived by the composer and sound designer Diego Navarro. Looking at phenomena such as the rise of QAnon, the artist suggests connections between gamification, fantasy, and political radicalization.
Viktor Timofeev "Twodom" (Latvia)
Twodom is a split-screen self-playing game surrounding two sets of characters. The characters, a group of humanoids and a flutter of butterflies, exist across two parallel realities in which their roles in a "cat and mouse" type of pursuit are reversed. They perform a generative, screen-specific, choreography in ten minute cycles, moving in tandem with their parallel world counterparts. The virtual camera orbiting the scene is also drawn into the performance, mimicking an omni-present surveillance device whose flight patterns and impulsive zooms are mirrored across the worlds. The path and outcome of each cycle is generally unique.
Jess Johnson & Simon Ward "FALSEY PLUS" (New Zealand)
Created from the hand-made drawings of Jess Johnson and brought to life with animation and direction from video artist Simon Ward, Falsey Plus impregnates hard geometry with organic life, leading the viewer into a psychedelic realm of potential and threat. An original soundtrack by Andrew Clarke navigates the dissonant clash between order and chaos.
https://www.jessjohnson.org
https://simonmward.com
Lawrence Lek "Nepenthe Zone (Leeum Edition)" (UK)
Named after the medicine for sorrow in Greek mythology, 'Nepenthe Zone' is a virtual environment that explores themes of memory and identity in video game environments. The video was originally produced for an installation of a 'chill-out club' environment that explored liminal space between reality and simulation. Internal voiceover monologue is combined with in-game subtitles to introduce the history of the island, interspersed with ideas of digital ruins, buried museums, and contemporary concerns about the future of memory. This latest edition, commissioned for Leeum Museum of Art in Seoul, South Korea, sets the viewer/player on a deserted island that contains the sites of the game's exhibition spaces: Ljubljana, London, and Seoul. The video and game take the form of a 'tutorial level' which guides the player on a tour through these real-life locations, adapted into fictionalised versions of themselves.
Rindon Johnson "I First You (11/11)" (USA)
An old romantic recounts memories of another time as the viewer spins through a glass island inhabited by little monuments in a placid, hilly sea.
Soundtrack by Milo McBride
Alan Warburton "Soft Crash" (UK)
Soft Crash is a meditation on the financial collapse of 2008 and the subsequent public bank bailouts, austerity economics and recent trends towards nationalist isolationism. It's a visual rendering of a neoliberalist endgame, where wealth and power are trapped in a closed system for the 1%.
Phil Solomon "Rehearsals for Retirement " (USA)
"A human life brought to an early stillness splashing down in oceanic oblivion searching for the depths of the sky. Darkness at the edge of town, light at the end of the tunnel, a stalled hearse and a souvenir from a dream. We walk in our sleep and fire walks with us. By fire we are consumed.
Rehearsing for eternity, for retirement. Life a sum of stolen moments stolen away by the Grand Theft. Next stop, the twilight plane, as an essence scattered, haunting all we ever knew." - Mark McElhatten
