Games as lights and colors on canvas workshop, ACC, Gwangju, ISEA June 2019

ISEA 2019 Asian Culture Center Gwangju, South Korea,
From 10am to 6pm at the Community Room 2
June 23 2019

This workshop is part of the first step of my Art + Games World Tour in South Korea. For this workshop I offered sub drives with a huge selection of indie, experimental games to the participants with at least ten of the indie games I found during my stay in Seoul.

Here are the two machinimas created by the participants:

Creator: Yang Jing, indie game columnist and curator, based in Hong Kong

For this machinima created collectively, we imagined a game to give a guideline to the movie we will create: an amazing set of random rules to play the games and then edit the recordings on an idea of Yang Jing. Here are the rules we followed to play and edit: Void, Nowhere, never go back, only go back if you see the sky, above 45 degrees sky means, if you have ten points you have to stop the game, quit the game when you are excited, find people to speak with and speak until people say NO, everything changes on red, if we eat something ou speed is doubled, if we see listen to a sound, we have to find the sound, no rules!

Creators: Sara Bonaventura, Lukasz Mirocha, Nick Beirne, Minsook Nam, Erik Zepka, Aditya Bansal, Carly Whitaker, Jihyun Song, Hyeji Han, Hugh Davies, Yang Jing and Isabelle Arvers

In the footsteps of machinima making – the use of video and computer games to direct movies with a game engine or in a 3D environment – 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 can be transformed into colors in order to produce a Mash Up, and a totally new original artwork.

This workshop aims to transform an object of mass consumption and entertainment into a means of film production and expression. The workshop intends to create hybrid works with students or professionals interested to push the boundaries between the video and computer games and the art world.

Game: Mountain by David O’Reilly

The Machinima Game art workshop aims to address critically video games and art, as installation, performance, digital painting in motion, gaming, interactivity or video. ISEA‘s themes of light and darkness will drive us to discover and focus on games related to these themes and will allow attendees to play with games of lights and darkness wandering in dark spaces looking for some light created by the moon or the sun or just reflected by a mirror. They will record these gameplay and then create video artworks or installations escaping darkness to find enlighted spaces.

Each step of the workshop can enable everyone to fit into a creative process: games wandering and recording, transforming games spaces into set design, video editing, sound mixing. The exhibition of each artwork will constantly be reminded to participants as a core aspect of their creation.

Game: Mind Path of Thalamus

The workshop begins with a screening of machinima and game artworks. This screening shows the variety of games used to design films or videos, as well as the variety of approaches, from the fan fiction to the most experimental artworks.

Following this presentation of machinima and game art screening, the audience discovers different production techniques of machinima, with PC games using FRAPS or OBS to capture gameplay in real time. The use of independent and experimental games is also highly recommended in order to benefit from the wide diversity of indie game productions.

In order to facilitate the discovery of indie and experimental games, Isabelle Arvers will present a selection of games focusing on light and darkness like the games : Beyond perception, Lumini, Matter, Reflections, Mind Path of Thalamus, Hyper light drifters, Penumbra, Mountain, Mirror Moon EP, Inside, Islands Non PLaces. Local indie and experimental games will be added to this selection by Isabelle Arvers thanks to her meetings with the local indie game scene.

Game: Lumini

If you want to have an insight of the possible outcomes of this workshop, look at novaRev the movie directed in the one day workshop held at the Cinema Nova in Brussels on the 28th of April 2019.

The hybrid artworks created by the participants to the workshop will be exhibited in ISEA 2019 exhibition. They will be presented as video screenings and video installations. The game art/machinima exhibition will be coordinated and curated by Isabelle Arvers with the help of the ISEA team.

Schedule :

10am – 10’30am Screening of some machinima films
10’30am – 12’30am Light and darkness games discovery and play by the participants
12’30 1pm Script or scenario writing
1’30pm – 3’30 pm Games recording
3’30 pm – 4pm Voice recording
4pm – 6pm Video Editing

Game: Islands non Places

2. Target audience and desired number of participants (10/20)

Students in art, visual art, game development and digital media.
Local and international artists and game developers and professionals

3. Preparations/prerequisite for participants, such as prerequisite knowledge, required equipment, and materials, if necessary

Participants don’t need to be good players or gamers, many games are intended to non players as well. Participants must come with their own laptops.

This project is supported by the French Institute