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.
CROWDSOURCING
edited recording of live a simulation
digital video (1920 x 1080), color, sound, 6’ 08”, 2021, United Kingdom
Created by Benjamin Hall
A live simulation created with Unity, Crowdsourcing examines the fatalistic relationship between predictability and chaos, and their conflation and obfuscation through systems of digital control. A large crowd congregates at the border of what Hall calls an “algorithmic predestination and aesthetic incoherence”. The crowd moves spasmodically: here the simulation does not reproduce the features of an ultra-detailed world, but rather its contours and contradictions.
Benjamin Hall is an artist, animator, filmmaker, game designer and writer. He received a BA Fine Art from the Glasgow School of Art, where he led DS2020 Simulator, a student project that virtually recreated his peers’ cancelled degree show as a free and accessible game-based space. Featuring the works of 136 graduates, DS2020 Simulator was discussed, among others, by BBC One, BBC Radio Scotland, the List UK and more. Benjamin’s work was featured in The Wrong Biennale (2019), Visual Arts Scotland’s Graduate Showcase (2020), HomeBrew Digital Commissions (2020), and Digital Artist Residency (2020). In September 2020, he moved to Jonava, Lithuania to transform the local public library into a virtual archival simulation. In 2021 he led the development of and participated in spur.world, an in-browser virtual multiverse featuring 14 fully explorable sub-worlds. Hall lives and works in Glasgow, Scotland.
HYPER TIMELAPSE GTAV (CROSSROAD OF REALITIES)
Benoit Paillé
machinima, sound, color, 2’ 20”, 2014 (Canada)
A time-lapse is a creative filming and video editing technique consisting in the active manipulation of the frame rate, that is, the number of images, or frames, that appear in a second of video. In most videos, the frame rate and playback speed coincide. In a time-lapse video, however, the frame rate is stretched out far more: when played back at average speed, time appears to be sped up. In 2014, Benoit Paillé created a seminal video time lapse of Grand Theft Auto V, as part of his investigation of photographic practices in video games, Crossroads of Realities. The result is a breathtaking taxi ride accompanied by an intense jazzy score.
Benoit Paillé is a self-taught French-Canadian photographer who lives and works in Québec, Canada. After studying biology for three years in a CÉGEP (a publicly funded college providing technical, academic, vocational or a mix of programs in Québec), he turned to the visual arts and decided to explore photography. According to his bio, Paillé sees himself as “a hyper realist painter” whose photographs document “an altered state of mind”. His work has been exhibited in Canada, Japan, Los Angeles, Barcelona, Moscow, and Ukraine. Among other things, he photographed speculative fiction writer William Gibson for the New Yorker magazine.
OUTSOURCING (MY DESIRES TO AVATARS)
Jamie Janković and Deborah Findlater
digital video, color, sound, 3’ 58”, 2021, United Kingdom
October 15 - 28 2021
Introduced by Riccardo Retez
Outsourcing (My Desires to Avatars) is a machinima and experimental video created by video artist Jamie Janković and writer, poet and director Deborah Findlater. The work is part of an ongoing project addressing the intersectionality of responses to female characters in video games; formally speaking, the work is presented as an audio-visual poem, accompanied by voice over. According to Janković, this work is meant as a response to found footage material of the character Christie from the popular fighting game series Dead or Alive (1996–ongoing). Moreover, the examination of the role of female characters in Outsourcing (My Desires to Avatars) is part of a larger project titled The identity quest series, in which the artist addresses a multiplicity of responses to female video game characters, following engagement in interviews with queer people within the gaming industry and exploring their own views on gender in game design.
Jamie Janković is a London-based filmmaker and video artist whose practice focuses on the dynamics of gender within video game worlds: in previous works, Janković has investigated the ways in which men are socially conditioned to their cultural model by visual media and explored through found footage technique how mainstream U.S. horror and sci-fi genres police masculinity through narrative and representation.
Deborah Findlater is a writer, poet, filmmaker and DJ from South London. As director, Findlater works with montage, installation and found footage in order to dissect the construction of narrative; as writer; as writer and DJ focuses on poetic qualities through its rhythmic use of voice, words and sound. Findlater artistic practice focuses on issues related to the working class, Blackness in Britain and Black Womxnhood.
KINGDOM OF SHADOWS
Recording of live performance, sound, color, 11’ 20”, 2021 (Israel)
Created by Amir Yatziv
Actors: Neta Shpigelman, Eliya Tsuchida
Computer graphics: Yuliya Bogonos
vral.org
Three avatars are auditioning for the role of a video game character under the vigilant eyes of a Japanese game designer. A human actor, wearing a motion-capture suit, performs a set of actions in real life that are translated in real time onto the on-screen image. Spectators see both. Conceived and produced by Amir Yatziv, this live performance blurring the lines that traditionally separate theater from digital gaming invites the viewer to consider the porosity between reality and simulation. Inspired by a scene in an episode of Final Fantasy, Kingdom of Shadows investigates the changing notions of identity, performance, and communication in a screen-based world.
Born in Israel, Amir Yatziv lives and works in Tel Aviv. After receiving a B.A. in Computer Science at the Interdisciplinary Center Herzliya in Israel, he studied Arts at the Bezalel Academy of Arts and Design in Jerusalem. He has directed several short films which were often exhibited as art installations as well. Among his solo exhibitions are This is Jerusalem Mr. Pasolini, Petah Tikva Museum of Art, Israel (2013), This is Jerusalem Mr. Pasolini, Galleria Laveronica, Modica, Italy (2012), Antipodes, Ramat-Gan Museum of Art, Tel-Aviv (2010). Group exhibitions include Too early, too late. Middle east and modernity, curated by Marco Scotini, Pinacoteca Nazionale, Bologna (2015), Space Oddity, A capsule exhibition, Kunstverein Nürnberg, Germany (2014), La guerra che verrà non è la prima, 1914–2014, MaRT, Rovereto (2014), Recalculating Route, 4 Mediations Biennale, Poznan (2014), CounterIntelligence, Hart House, curated by Charles Stankievech, University of Toronto, Canada (2014), Time Pieces, Nordstern Videokunstzentrum, curated by Marius Babias and Kathrin Becker, Gelsenkirchen, Germany (2014), Measure for Measure, curated by Drorit gur-arie and Hila Cohen-Schneiderman, Petah Tikva Museum of Art, Israel (2014), Give Us The Future, curated by Frank Wagner, n.b.k Berlin, Germany (2014), Artists’ Film International, Whitechapel Gallery, London, United Kingdom (2014), Multiplicity, NURTUREart, curated by Marco Antonini and Hila Cohen-Schneiderman, New York (2014).
