WELCOME TO MY DESERT NEXUS (DEEP INSIDE MY DESERT HEART)
digital video (1920 x 1080), color, sound, 44’ 50”, 2021 (United States)
screen recording of a live/virtual performance at Pioneer Works, Brooklyn, New York on June 13 2021
Created by Kara Güt
Welcome to My Desert Nexus is a three-act play performed within a video game, which follows two players within Red Dead Redemption Online as they encounter existential quandaries in the digital desert. Part table-read, part live gaming event, Welcome to My Desert Nexus combines the aesthetics of theater and video games. The original play consists of an in-person presentation performed live at Pioneer Works, Brooklyn, New York on June 13 2021 resembling that of a live gaming event in which the players and their battle stations occupy the stage. Additionally, Welcome to My Desert Nexus was simultaneously streamed on the internet and accessible to anyone. The performance featured the four actors on stage controlling their avatars and reading their lines live. The narrator, in addition to controlling an avatar, performed live cuts via video switcher, allowing the screen to switch between the actors’ perspectives based on who was talking. This specific iteration of Welcome to My Desert Nexus, which is now presented on VRAL, starred Tommy Martinez as Charlie, Emma Levesque-Schaefer as Frances, Noah D’Orazio as Shepherd, and Kara Güt as Narrator. The original soundtrack was composed by Justin Majetich.
Kara Güt investigates the new contours of human intimacy shaped by an increasingly pervasive online lifestyle, constructed detachment from reality, and the power dynamics of the virtual. Using image and screen-based media, Güt explores the ontological necessity of certain digital spaces. She is specifically interested in how the patriarchal conversation within these contexts can be subverted by the artists and the participants’ intervention to generate new meaning. Working with video, screen capture, and the web, video games, and other digital spaces, Güt creates artworks that are sculptural in nature. She is interested in expressing the mythos of the digital and its manifestations in the physical realm. This notion – which takes the form of objects that play with language, translation, faux-intimacy, consumerism, and a metamorphosis born from the lore of digital, and internet lifestyles – informs her practice. A multidisciplinary artist with an MFA from Cranbrook Academy of Art, Güt is the recipient of the Peter MacKendrick Endowment for Visual Artists, Güt has been featured on Refigural Magazine, The Unstitute, and the Detroit Center for Contemporary Photography among others. Her work is part of the Cranbrook Art Museum collection as well as several private collections. Güt currently lives and works in Columbus, Ohio.
FLYIN' HIGH
digital video (3840 × 2160), color, sound, 59’ 21”, 2021 (Italy)
Created by The Cool Couple
September 3 - 16 2021
Introduced by Matteo Bittanti
What is the relationship between aviation and computation, technology and the environment? Experience the inner contradictions of the modern age – in which your favorite technological marvel is an agent of environmental destruction – through a simulated flight in the virtual skies. Hosted on Microsoft’s Azure “cloud” infrastructure, this journey illustrates the true consequences of unbridled technological “progress”.
The Cool Couple – often shortened TCC – is an artist duo based in Milan, Italy, established in 2012 by Niccolò Benetton (1986) and Simone Santilli (1987). Their multidisciplinary practice investigates the friction points generated daily by the interaction between people and images. The Cool Couple combines artistic research with teaching: they are lecturers at NABA in Milan and Course Leaders of the BA in Visual Arts at MADE Program.
RADICALIZATION PIPELINE
Digital video (1920 x 1080), color, sound, 15’ 01”, 2021 (Greece)
Created by Theo Triantafyllidis
July 23 - August 5 2021
Introduced by Matteo Bittanti
You may disagree about the root causes, but the diagnosis is crystal clear: reality has imploded. The symptoms are everywhere. Video game fantasies, themes, characters, and narratives – which used to be confined to the imaginary – now shape our everyday life. In a world where meme presidents plan insurrections, global corporations are actively destroying the planet, social media are a toxic cesspool, a new kind of superstition – conspiracy theories, lore, false narratives – has become the dominant epistemological currency. In this uncertain, hyper violent, and chaotic scenario – complicated by metacrises, climate catastrophe, and ongoing pandemics – artists have been among the few to clearly identify the culprits and to imagine possible alternatives. In his latest work, Radicalization Pipeline, Greek artist Theo Triantafyllidis simulates the perpetual clash of two endless hordes fighting to death with large melee weapons. A wide range of characters – from citizen militias to fantastical creatures, from street protesters to hooligans – kill each other tirelessly. There’s no resolution. There’s no closure. Just mutual destruction. This is the Game over age. We now live in the world that video games made.
Theo Triantafyllidis (b. 1988, Athens, Greece) is an artist who builds virtual spaces and interfaces for the human body to inhabit them. He creates expansive worlds and complex systems where the virtual and the physical merge in uncanny, absurd and poetic ways. These are often manifested as performances, virtual and augmented reality experiences, games and interactive installations. He uses awkward interactions and precarious physics, to invite the audience to embody, engage with and challenge these other realities. Through the lens of monster theory, he investigates themes of isolation, sexuality and violence in their visceral extremities. He offers computational humor and AI improvisation as a response to the tech industry’s agenda. He tries to give back to the online and gaming communities that he considers both the inspiration and context for his work by remaining an active participant and contributor. He holds an MFA from UCLA, Design Media Arts and a Diploma of Architecture from the National Technical University of Athens. He has shown work in museums, including the Hammer Museum in LA and NRW Forum in Dusseldorf, DE and various galleries such as Meredith Rosen Gallery, the Breeder, Eduardo Secci and Transfer. He was part of Sundance New Frontier 2020, Hyper Pavilion in the 2017 Venice Biennale and the 2018 Athens Biennale: ANTI-. Theo Triantafyllidis is based in Los Angeles.
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.
UBERMORGEN
Chinese Gold (Boom)
June 25 - July 8 2021
Introduced by Matteo Bittanti
vral.org
Approximately fifteen years ago, UBERMONGEN introduced Chinese Gold, a sui generis investigation of the gold farming phenomenon, that is, the practice of playing a massively multiplayer online game with the specific aim of acquiring in-game currency and later selling it for real-world money. An ambitious mixed (hyper)media project featuring texts, machinima, and re-appropriated prints, Chinese Gold brought to the surface the highly exploitative nature of video game playing. Thousands of Chinese players worked nonstop in the digital equivalent of sweatshops to generate virtual currency, digital items, and even full characters for Western, mostly North American and European, players. This lo-res found footage video, originally uploaded on Google and appropriated by the artists, showcases a teleportation hack in World of Warcraft, repeated over and over by Chinese gold farmers. Interestingly, this emergent practice was exploited, among others, by a company managed by Steve K. Bannon, an American media executive, political strategist, and former investment banker, who served as the White House’s chief strategist in the administration of U.S. President Donald Trump. Bannon was just one of several American intermediaries who set up companies that hired these digital workers. UBERMORGEN’s prophetic examination of gold-farming highlights the complex interplay between gaming and politics, ideology and capitalism. In the age of gamified economies, trade wars, pandemics, conspiracy theories, pervasive trolling, and armed insurrections, Chinese Gold speaks of the current moment.
UBERMORGEN is an artist duo founded in 1995. Actionist autist lizvlx and pragmatic visionary Hans Bernhard are net.art pioneers and media hackers widely recognized for their high-risk research into data & matter, conceptual art, haute couture websites and polarizing social experiments. CNN called them 'Maverick Austrian Business People' during their Vote-Auction online project. They reached a global audience of 500 million while challenging the FBI, CIA, and NSA during the US presidential election. In 2005, they launched their acclaimed EKMRZ Trilogy, a series of conceptual hacks – Google Will Eat Itself, Amazon Noir, and The Sound of eBay. UBERMORGEN controls 175 domains. Their exhibitions include Liverpool Biennial; Whitney Museum (2020); New Museum, New York; Somerset House, London; Haifa Museum of Art, Israel/Palestine (2019); Wei-Ling Contemporary Malaysia; HKW, Berlin; ZKM; National Art Gallery, Sofia (2017); ICA Miami; Mahatma Gandhi Institute, Mauritius (2015); Serpentine Galleries, London (2014); Kunsthal Aarhus; Ars Electronica, Austria; MoMA Ljubljana; ArtScience Museum, Singapore (2013); 3331 Arts Chiyoda, Japan (2012); Centre Pompidou; Gwangju Design Biennale; WRO Media Art Biennale (2011); Prague Biennale (2009); Biennale of Sydney (2008); MOCA Taipei (2007); The Premises, Johannesburg; ICC Tokyo (2005); SFMOMA, USA (2001).
