Expositions / exhibitions

Isabelle Arvers conçoit des expositions de machinimas sur des thèmes tels que le genre, le féminisme, le glitch, les frontières, l’identité… Ces sélections sont présentées dans des contextes artistiques, des galeries et des musées.

Isabelle Arvers designs machinima exhibitions on different thematics, like gender, feminism, glitch, borders, identity… These selections are presented in artistic contexts, galleries and museums.

Immortality Overkill Festival
MASH UP
UCLA Game Art Festival
Machinigirlzzzzz
Machiniglitch
Identity, otherness, games & machinima
When machinima talk about video games and when games reflect reality
Projections / Screenings

MASH UP à la Vancouver Art Gallery

MashUp: The Birth of Modern Culture
February 20 to June 12, 2016

UCLA Game Art Festival

Wednesday, November 18th, The Hammer Museum
Curators: Eddo Stern, Isabelle Arvers, and Lee Tusman
voir le site du festival
Machinima selection :
Codes of Honor, Jon Rafman, CA, 2011 13 ’59 | Free Fall, Palle Torrson, Sweden, 2011 – Game Modification Half life 2 2’15 | Post Newtonianism (War Footage/ Call of Duty 4 Modern Warfare Footage), Josh Bricker, USA, 2010 5’30 | The french democracy Alex Chan (FR), 13’10 | This Spartan Life, Episode 3 Module 5 Interview Malcolm Mc Laren 9’18

Machinigirlzzzzz

Festival Gamerz 10, Aix en Provence, 2014

Machinigirrlzzz est une exposition de machinimas – films conçus à l’intérieur de jeux vidéo – réalisés par des femmes. Le choix du titre Machinigirrlzzz a été dicté par le désir de traiter de la question du féminisme et de celle du genre dans les jeux vidéo. Ces deux questions sont d’actualité car le féminisme reste encore très mal perçu en France, alors qu’en 2014, il existe toujours près de 20% de différences entre les salaires des hommes et ceux des femmes. L’autre question éminemment actuelle est celle du genre dans les jeux vidéo. 2013 a été l’année où Mar_lard a «éveillé» les consciences en publiant un recensement quasi exhaustif de toutes les attaques sexistes perpétrées contre les femmes dans le monde du jeu vidéo[1]. Elle a ensuite été relayée par l’émission Arrêt sur images, conçue en partenariat avec le magazine Canard PC qui a ensuite publié un dossier spécial : « le jeu vidéo est-il sexiste? », puis complétée par le site jeuxvideo.com qui a consacré un dossier spécial à l’inégalité de traitement des personnages féminins et masculins dans le jeu vidéo[3]. Ces médias spécialisés ont reconnu et recensé les forts problèmes de sexisme dans cet univers encore très masculin, alors qu’un joueur sur deux aujourd’hui est une femme.

Machinigirrlzzz is an exhibition of machinimas (movies created through video games), made by women only. The choice of the title Machinigirrlzzz was dictated by the will to question the notions of feminism and gender in video games. Feminism is still an issue in France, a particularly touchy and ongoing subjet in a country where remained in 2014 a 20 % salary difference between men and women on average.

The question of gender is also ongoing in the world of video games. In 2013, Mar_lard raised public awareness on the matter, by publishing a quasi expansive census of all sexist attacks done against women in the world of video games. The census was in turn taken by the French TV programme Arrêt sur Images, in partnership with the French magazine Canard PC, which front-paged with the headline « Are video games sexist ? », soon followed by the website jeuxvideo. com, with a special dossier dedicated to the unequal treatment of male and female characters in vidéo games.

At The Expense of Watching – Angela Washko | 99 Problems [WASTED], GTAV intervention – Georgie Roxby Smith | The Fontaine’s #2: DAUGHTER – Anita Fontaine

Machiniglitch

Vector Art Festival, Toronto, 2014   |   Festival Gamerz 09, Aix en Provence, 2013

Le mot glitch est apparu en 1962 pour décrire une erreur ou un dysfonctionnement dans le cadre d’un programme spatial aux Etats-Unis. Le terme s’est ensuite largement répandu dans le domaine de la musique électronique des années 90. La notion de glitch s’apparente à l’idée d’accident, à la répétition, à la linéarité ou encore à la fragmentation pour reprendre les caractéristiques listées par Iman Morandi dans « Les esthétiques glitch » en 2004.

Que le glitch soit voulu par l’artiste ou totalement involontaire, la beauté naît de l’accident et de l’erreur. L’art du glitch consiste souvent à manipuler le médium, à triturer le code, la carte graphique, tout le « back stage » d’une image fixe ou animée et à voire ce que cela produit, suivant ainsi un mouvement entamé dans l’art vidéo par Nam June Paik avec le tube cathodique.

The word « glitch » first appeared in spaceship programmes in the USA in 1962. A computer glitch is the failure of a system, usually containing a computing device, to complete its functions or to perform them properly. The word spread to electronic music in the 1990’s. Glitch goes with the notions of bug, repetiton , linearity or fragmentation to quote Iman Morandi’s « Aestehetics of glitch », 2004.

Machiniglitch is an ode to the Glitch Aesthetics!

Jupiter and Beyond the Blocks – Félicien Goguey & Benjamin Bartholet | Machinhuma – Edouard Taufenbach | Bitsplit – Florian Dieude | Metropolis – Chris Hawlett | Prepare to Qualify – Clint Enns | Glitch Kungfu – Entter, Goto80 | Borders: boulders at la rotonda – Mary Flanagan | The Fall girl – Georgie Roxby Smith | 8000 people – Knut LSG Hybinette | Dust 2 dust – Kent Sheely | Memory of a broken dimension – Datatragedy | 30 seconds or more 01 – Beyond the magic mushrooms – Victor Morales | Knightshift – Anita Fontaine | Remember when we walked to the edge of the world? – jonCates | Formation VI – Baden Pailthorpe

Identity, otherness, games & machinima

Gamerz #08, ARCADE PACA, Aix-en-Provence, 19-28 October 2012

By setting foot on this planet, each of us is thrown into the big play, the rules of which we have not been allowed to choose. In this world, human actions are no events we can determine freely, but we always have to steer a middle course between the playing rules and the playroom in which human freedom resides. For as long as extra-terrestrial journeys to other life-sustaining planets remain confined to science fiction movies, this earthly stage will be beginning and end, past and future, fate and hope of the play of life as it unfolds. The boundaries of this playing field constitute the limits, within which seven billion tragicomedies are performed. Therefore, to all of us, the most important question in life is: ‘wanna play’? (Jeroen Timmermans, 2010)*

Codes of Honor, Jon Rafman | Selection, Reflection, Attention, Ahmed El Shaer | This Spartan Life Episode 7, Bongdern Productions | Free Fall, Palle Torrson | Under Examination, Ahmed El Shaer | Soul Lewitt v1.1, Cyril Lecomte Languérand | Stranger Comes To Town, Jaqueline Goss | Woods: Episode 1 by Shados (Crysis 2 Machinima) | I is an other, Isabelle Arvers | WAY, an online computer game played with an anonymous partner. Coco & co

When machinima talk about video games and when games reflect reality

Gamerz Festival #7 – ARCADE, Aix-en-Provence, November 2011

A selection of films made from video game engines or from a Game Boy camera, as it is the case with Windshield Baby by Clint Enns. To give a critical look at a world that turns into a game and blurs the boundaries, with the film Newtonianism Post by Josh Bricker, or Borderline, a game project by Mathias Fuchs. A critic of a world of emptiness with the Secret Confessions by Systaime which takes dialogues of reality TV to create machinima or the Moviestorm machinima audition tape, by the digital punk artist Jon Cates who remix extracts from the software Moviestorm with theory around seduction or game culture.

Same As It Ever Was, Thuyan Nguyen | >Windshield Baby Gameboy Movie, Clint Enns | The Masters of Forge, This spartan life Episode 8, Bong Dern Prod | Moviestormmachinima audition tape, Jon Cates | The G-Mod Idiot Box (Series, Half-Life 2), DasBoschitt | Borderline, Mathias Fuchs | Post Newtonianism (War Footage/ Call of Duty 4 Modern Warfare Footage), Josh Bricker | Confessions secrètes, Systaime | The Leet World, Smooth Few Films

Immortality machinima exhibition for the Overkill Festival

The Overkill is a 48 hours nonstop festival which regroups an art exhibition, a selection of indie games, an alternative movie program, live performance and many activities such as workshops, master class, talks… all selected around our theme and presented together in an original and immersive setting. I am thrilled to join the team this weekend to present this machinima selection, Marie Janin, Overkill Festival’s art director asked me to curate;)

“Writing about immortality in Egypt is being exactly at the right place. Egypt can be considered as the mother country of immortality with its ancestral knowledge on how to preserve bodies and the needs a human being will have to use along its never ending journey. This desire of remaining alive beyond death is more than present 5000 years later, as we are still trying to exceed our condition of simple humans…

Virtual worlds open the door to all our transhumanist desires. Gamers can experience this death that doesn’t kill, these fights from which they never suffer. That’s the Safe Society offered by Martin Lechevalier: a world where you don’t die, in which drugs are safe, kids are disease free… You can commit suicide, one after the other, 99 times even if you want but you will still remain part of the game like in the 99 problems, an online performance in GTA created by Georgie Roxbie Smith to raise awareness on how gamers behave towards women.

But until it is not recorded it only belongs to gamers’ experiences and doesn’t last for the others. That’s what machinima – making 3D movies in real time inside a virtual environment – can provide : they allow us to document these game experiences and share them.

In Bitsplit Florian Dioude superimposes many layers of the same game scenes of Fallout 2. It makes avatars appear and disappear like ghosts. Gamers dialogs leave traces of their former presence, in this film they become evanescent, almost unreadable. This sensation of being somewhere but invisible to the others, also takes place in Martin Pleure by Jonathan Vinel. Martin wakes up one day and all his friends have disappeared. He looks for them desperately but no one knows where they are, only Non Player Characters unable to communicate with him inside GTA. Even trees cannot answer his questions…

That’s a possible problem with immortality : you remain alive but alone, all the others – the ones you loved and who knew you – have all disappeared. That’s what also experiences the fictitious character of Crossover (the scene) by Ahmed El Shaer. In his search for a place where death doesn’t exist, he walks and walks and finally finds it, but getting back to his hometown, he discovers he lost his family and beloved…

On the contrary, Robert Stoneman created a vibrant tribute to his father who just passed in Rusty Whispers : Dennis using a game engine for this very short and poetic film to animate his memories. Because besides everything, it is in our memory that the ones who passed remain immortal. The recovery of the past can be sometimes hazardous as it happens in Liz Solo science fiction The Wide Sky : the archive. Digging into the past memory makes future researcher cries, as much as her tears end up as an ocean that flows over everything, in a perpetuous wave movement, never ending but never the same.”

Isabelle Arvers, in front of the red sea in Dahab Paradise, nov 2018

Projections / Screenings

Gameplay, Itau Cultural, Sao Paulo & Mostravideo, Belo Horizonte, Brasil, aug 2009
Symposium Imagine the Future, Neuchatel, 2 jully 09
Récréations, Scène Numérique, Aix-en-Provence, 12 feb 2009
Ciant, Cinema Svetnor, Prague, february 2007
Animation Film Festival Annecy, june 2007
Flash Festival, Centre Pompidou, Paris, 2006 – 2007 – 2008
Némo Festival, Regional cultural action in Ile de France, Espace Cartier, Paris, april 2006