During a machinima screening curated for the Mostravideo in Belo Horizonte in 2009, someone in the audience asked me if there were a specific machinima narrative or if machinima was just borrowing its langage to cinema and video? In other words, how being inside a video game could influence the way we tell stories? I had to recognize that the influence wasn’t obvious and that the machinima laguage was just at his first stages. It also made me realize that the future of machinima wouldn’t be only in linear stories and in storytelling but more in the hybridation of games and art installations, interactive fictions, machini/games.
On my way back to France, I decided to organize game art and machinima workshops in order to diversify the audience of machinima makers and make it more wellknown in different kind of artistic disciplines.
In the footsteps of machinima making, games can be perceived as a medium and as a raw material for artists to create hybrids artworks from stop motion, video art, experimental cinema, installations and interactive artworks. Thanks to machinima techniques and editing software, games can be mixed to each other and transformed into colors in order to produce a Mash Up, and a totally new original artwork.
In France, I designed machinima/art game workshops for the Superior Art Schools of Cergy, Cambrai, Mulhouse and Paris. Since 2013, I have also been teaching a course on “Creativity and Networks” in the context of the MA in Arts and Digital Media at the Sorbonne University, which ends with a machinima module. More lately I gave also a workshop at the Fine Art School of Geneva, HEAD.
By using virtual spaces and changing the perspective as an artistic strategy, machinima allow a distanced critique of a simulated world. They tend to erase the boundaries between reality and fiction and redefine the transgressive power of the game.
The videos above were directed by the students of The Superior Art School of Paris during a 3 days workshop…
Here you can download all the informations about the workshop: Games as colors on canvas!
Bertrand faucher
J’ai Regardé les deux premières vidéo ainsi que celle avec le métalophone. Je découvre votre travail. Il me semble que la continuité du support vidéo, si c’est le thème, est un bon terrain pour expérimenter la continuité des corps ou au moins un bon prétexte pour en discuter contre celle du réel. J’adore votre gracia graphique dès qu’il atteint un seuil de densité. En deçà, l’approche narrative empreinte de philosophie exige sans doute une forme de complémentarité qui appelle à une pédagogie. Bravo pour cette transmutation de la matière qui me touche en éclairages multiples. Mon travail et ma réflexion abordent ces thématiques. Bertrand