Workshop Statement

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

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. The Machinima Game art workshop aims to address critically video games and art, as installation, performance, digital painting in motion, gaming, interactivity or video. ISEA2019’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.
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 dedicated softwares like Moviestorm or Iclone and with video games, like GTA for its video editor or any PC games using FRAPS 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 : Reflections, Matter, Beyound perception, Lumini, Mirror moon, One and light, Hyper light drifters, Mountain, Penumbra, One hand clapping. Local indie and experimental games will be added to this selection by Isabelle Arvers thanks to her meetings with the local indie game  scene. The hybrid artworks created by the participants to the workshop will be exhibited in ISEA2019 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 ISEA2019 team.

• Isabelle Arvers (Curator and Game Artist, Machinima Specialist, Director of Kreron) is an author, an art curator and a game artist. Her field of investigation is the immaterial, through the relationship between Art, Video Games, Internet and new forms of images.  Coordinator of ISEA2000 in Paris for Art 3000, she is a pioneer in the field of game art in France with the exhibition Playtime – the gaming room of Villette Numérique she curated in 2002. Her following exhibitions and projects then presented the video game as a new language and as a medium for artists. In partnership with the Gamerz Festival in Aix-en-Provence, she designed the first machinima exhibitions in art gallery and continued to work with curatorial exhibitions of independent games, game art and retrogaming in France with Dream Games, Political Games, Games Reflexions and abroad with Evolution of Gaming, in Vancouver in 2014 and UCLA Gamelab Festival in 2015. She also proposes machinima workshops and trainings around these new means of creation, notably with the NGO Kareron that she created and direct since 2014. From 2014 to 2016, Kareron co-produced the anti-Atlas of borders exhibitions and distributed Migreurop’s exhibition Moving Beyond Borders. In 2015, Kareron produced the exhibition The end of the map with the Sorbonne. In 2018 Kareron produced Transborder / Nathalie Magnan’s Teachings at MUCEM. Kareron has produced the interactive installation Uki Enter the Bionet by artist Shulea Cheang and is currently producing the interactive film UKI Cinema Interrupted by artist Shulea Cheang. Since 2017, Isabelle Arvers curates Art Games Demos, a series of events aimed at promoting video art, animation, machinimas and experimental, independent and artistic video games in a music party. Isabelle curated the 6th edition of Art Games Demos in Medellin in 2018.

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