Lights will guide you home
digital video/machinima (1920 x 1080), color, sound, 10’ 17”, 2022, Germany
Created by Sebastian Schmieg
On Twitch and YouTube, gamers stream how they fly over a digital copy of our world using flight simulators — some curious, others dutiful, and quite a few in the service of virtual airlines following official flight schedules. During their flights, they are often guided by other gamers who participate as air traffic controllers. Sebastian Schmieg regularly watches both pilots and air traffic controllers and collects and archives their virtual work. In the winter of 2020, Schmieg exhibited a collection of video clips showing gamers configuring their aircrafts in their virtual cockpits. In a new iteration of his work, titled Lights will guide you home, they drive to the runway, accelerate and take off, soaring into the skies of Microsoft Flight Simulator.
Sebastian Schmieg investigates the algorithmic circulation of images, texts, and bodies. He creates playful interventions that penetrate the shiny surfaces of our networked society and explore the realities that lie behind them. Specifically, Schmieg focuses on labor, algorithmic management, and artificial intelligence. He works in a wide range of media including video, website, installation, artist book, custom software, lecture performance, and delivery service. Schmieg’s work has been exhibited internationally at The Photographers’ Gallery London, MdbK Leipzig, HeK Basel, and Chronus Art Center Shanghai. He lives and works in Berlin and Dresden.
Fintech for the Precariat
digital video (3840 x 2160), color, sound, 11’ 37”, 2017, United States
video documentation of an immersive world application
Created by Ricardo Miranda Zúñiga, 2021
February 18 - March 3 2022
Introduced by Matteo Bittanti
FinTech for the Precariat is an immersive urban environment populated by Greed, Lust, Gluttony, Envy, gig workers and twelve voices from New York City’s financial spectrum. As the user wanders around this environment, she stumbles upon its inhabitants — from financial brokers to recent college grads to computer programmers and cultural workers —, gaining an understanding of their financial perspectives. It has been projected that the 2020s will be the decade of the “FinTech Revolution”. This marketing hyperbole is on the heels of many such revolutions sold on the broken promises of democratization and prosperity for all. FinTech for the Precariat asks a simple question: Who are the winners and losers in this “game”?
Ricardo Miranda Zúñiga is a new media artist. He approaches art as a social practice that seeks to establish dialogue in public spaces. Zúñiga received a B.A. in Practice of Arts and English Literature at University at California, Berkeley, and later an M.A. in Fine Arts a from Carnegie Mellon University. Born in San Francisco in the early Seventies in a family of immigrants from Nicaragua, Zúñiga’s practice explores such themes as immigration, discrimination, gentrification, globalization, and commodification. His works have been exhibited internationally, often behind the contexts of art galleries and museums.
LIPSTRIKE
live recording of online performance
digital video (1280 x 720), sound, color, 10’, 2021 [2016], France
Created by Chloé Desmoineaux
Originally created in 2016, Lipstrike is an online performance in Counter-Strike that uses an unusual device as a weapon: a lipstick. Each time the artist applies cosmetics on her lips, her gun unleashes a torrent of bullets. She broadcast her performances on Twitch, receiving thousands of snarky comments by angry gamers, which were eventually collected and published in a limited edition booklet. Five years later, the artist updated the original iteration for VRAL. One question remains: has anything changed since #Gamergate?
Interested in tactical media, hacking culture, and cyberfeminism, Chloé Desmoineaux creates media experiments through performances, installations and hijacked video games. She is especially concerned about the place given to women as well as dissident and “minority” people in the video game industry and she tries to create spaces of visibility and reflection to discuss these issues. She is a member of the Freesson collective which focuses on supporting creative practices, electronic music and organizing events and workshops around digital art and culture. Co-organizer of the Art Games Demos (2017-2919) initiative with Isabelle Arvers, Desmoineaux has curated several exhibitions about the culture, aesthetics and ideology of gaming in the past decade. Her work has been exhibited internationally. She led several workshops on alternative controllers, glitch, interactive animations, and video games. Desmoineaux lives and works in Marseille.
Kent Sheely
Ice Cream President
digital video, black and white, sound, 06’ 37” (United States)
July 9 - July 22 2021
Introduced by Matteo Bittanti
vral.org
Fifteen years after its first appearance, Hitman: Blood Money’s disarming yet lethal ice cream truck returns in this bleak machinima that focuses on a much bigger tragedy. What happens when the video game imaginary breaks the fourth wall and enters the so-called “reality”? You may get two scoops of Ice Cream President.
Kent Sheely (b. 1984, United States) is a new media artist based in Los Angeles. His work draws both inspiration and foundation from the aesthetics and culture of video games, examining the relationships between real and imagined worlds. Much of his work centers around the translation and transmediation of symbols, concepts, and expectations from game space to the real world and vice versa, forming new bridges between simulation and lived reality.
