4 October 2006

MIND GAMES

 

Artprojx and onedotzero presents:

in association with Postmasters NY


A London Games Festival Fringe Event


MIND GAMES (The Art of Video Games)


Wednesday 4 October 2006. 6.30-8.30pm

Artprojx at Prince Charles Cinema

7 Leicester Place, London WC2.

Box Office: +44 (0) 20 7494 3654 (open 1-9pm)
www.princecharlescinema.com

Tickets £10.00

Artist and Student ticket discount information visit www.artupdate.com/artprojx


Screening organised by David Gryn

Contact/info/press events@artprojx.com

+44(0)7711 127 848


Event partners:

www.onedotzero.com

www.londongamesfringe.com

www.postmastersart.com

www.fetherstonhaugh.com


Artprojx 06 is kindly supported by Arts Council England, Lottery Funded www.artscouncil.org.uk

 

Artprojx and onedotzero presents:

in association with Postmasters NY

a London Games Festival Fringe Event

 

MIND GAMES (The Art of Video Games)

ARTISTS NOTES

MIND GAMES: Artist Information

CAO FEI
Born in Guangzhou in 1978, currently lives in Beijing. Cao Fei stated, her generation no longer has a clear target against which to rebel. In an atmosphere of greater government tolerance, she employs video, photography, performance to explore the experience of living in a rapidly changing urban environment. Globalization has brought them into contact with Western contemporary art, which explains the increasing visual similarity, but their concerns remain unique to present-day China. Cao Fei' s achievement is in combining existing genres to offer a new kind of critique of a new Chinese society. Represented by Courtyard gallery in Beijing and Lombard-Freid, New York, she participated in group shows at Victoria & Albert Museum, London, Centre Pompidou, Paris, and Moma in New York. She has been invited to participate in the 5th Shanghai Biennial. Shanghai Museum of Art, Shanghai and the 50th edition of the Venice Biennale in 2003.


"COSPlayers" is an exhibition of photographs and a video that Cao Fei shot in her native city of Guangzhou (formerly Canton). At the southeastern tip of China, just north of Hong Kong, Guangzhou is the capital of the Guangdong province, where private capital is fuelling rapid urban development. Her subjects are teenagers obsessed with Japanese anime who dress up as their favorite characters and act out dramatic battles atop grey skyscrapers. These role-playing games are called Cosplay (short for costume play) and they take place all over the world, from Dallas to Singapore. Unlike the badly shot photographs on Cosplay websites, and there are millions of them, Cao Fei' s images are meticulously constructed and the costumes elaborate, the urban backgrounds carefully chosen and the characters rigidly posed. She captures these characters as they confront one another in front of banal cityscapes, and at rest, still colorfully spandexed, in their homes.
www.caofei.com

 

KRISTIN LUCAS
Kristin Lucas received a BA from Cooper Union for Advancement of Science and Art. Her videos have been screened in The Young and the Restless exhibit at the Museum of Modern Art, NYC. Following her exhibition at Momenta, Lucas exhibited with numerous venues, including Artists Space, NYC, Dia Center for the Arts, NYC, P.S.1 Contemporary Art Center, Long Island City, NY, and Jack Tilton Gallery, NYC. Her work was included in the 1997 Whitney Biennial, NYC. Kristin Lucas is one of a new generation of young artists working in video, installation, performance and interactive Web projects. In her anecdotal, performative mini-dramas, she constructs virtual relationships with computers, television, and electronic media. Set against an empty world of video games, daytime television and shopping malls, her diaristic work resonates with social isolation and alienation from the electronic media that she posits as a surrogate for personal interaction.


Shot on location at Biosphere 2 and in the surrounding Arizona desert, Lo-Fi Green Sigh is a playful pastiche of science fiction movie conventions, scored to ominous electronic drones. Lucas' student collaborators don makeshift space-suits and play badminton among the cacti, while Lucas herself scans the electromagnetic spectrum with an antenna fashioned from a vegetable steamer. With its retro-futuristic architecture, eerily artificial interiors, and otherworldly landscapes, Lo-Fi Green Sigh merges B-movie science and science fiction, with echoes of Roswell, alien life, and extra-terrestrial feedback.
www169.pair.com/klucas/archive

MILTOS MANETAS
Born in Athens, Greece, lives between Los Angeles and Paris. Manetas has produced oil paintings of wires, cables and computer hardware, created short looped fragments of video games such as "Tomb Raider," and exhibited computer-generated vibracolour prints among other things. Manetas has exhibited throughout Europe and the United States. He has recently exhibited atYvon Lambert, Paris, and his work has been shown at the Centre Pompidou, in Paris (2000), Whitney Biennial (2002) and the Venice Biennale (2005). In 1999, Miltos Manetas and ArtProduction Fund commission to the California based Branding Company Lexicon, a new name for the Arts. The project is code-named ?WORD and it's sponsored by APF which also sponsors this website until today. In April 2000, Lexicon delivers to them many names from which to choose. Miltos Manetas and Mai Ueda, pick up "Neen". May 31, 2000, Presentation of Neen at the Gagosian Gallery in NY.


The videos «Flames 1» and «Flames 2» are based on short sequences of the game «Tombraider,» in the protagonist dies a virtual death – ending the game normally. Yet Manetas keeps the female protagonist in this situation thereby continuing the game and making it a stimulating experience to see her rise again and again after being defeated only to play another round - and so on ad absurdum. Instead of keeping her alive by playing the game with virtuosity, the idea surfaces that it might be more cruel to not let her die when faced with such an endless fight against death.

www.manetas.com

 

DIEGO PERRONE
Born in Asti, Italy, in 1974 and currently based in Berlin, Germany, and Milan, Diego Perrone has exhibited throughout Europe and the United States. He has recently exhibited at the Berlin Biennale, in 2006, and has been shown at the Centre Pompidou, in Paris and the Venice (2003) and Moscow Biennial (2005). He is represented by galleria Massimo de Carlo, Milan, and Casey Caplan, New York.

Although Diego Perrone has stayed close to home to carry out some of his recent photographic projects, the results are anything but ordinary or expected. The landscape and residents of Asti, the artist's hometown in northern Italy, were the subject of his photographic series I Pensatori di buchi (The Thinkers of Holes, 2002). First, the artist and his father spent several months digging large holes on their property, initially softening the soil by burning it. Then Perrone photographed young men from town, either clothed or naked, sitting at the edges of the openings. Perrone's manipulation of the land recalls 1970s Earthworks, and the collision of human beings and nature connects his practice to Arte Povera; like those Italian artists, Perrone explores the interchange between art, life, and the natural world. For Come suggestionati da quello che dietro loro rimane fermo (As if Fascinated by what Remains Still in the Background, 1999), he photographed elderly residents of Asti holding large animal horns and antlers. The juxtaposition of aging flesh and hardened organic material is a compelling existential metaphor that also lends a mythical, almost talismanic quality to the images.

YORGOS SAPOUNTZIS
Born 1976 in Athens, Yorgos Sapountzis lives and works in Berlin. He is represented by galerie Isabella Bortolozzi, Berlin.
Yorgos Sapountzis’ Yeti-Lines (2005) quotes from Durs Grünbein’s poem ‘Yeti’. The film utilises a webcam installed at the corner of the Deutsches Historisches Museum in central Berlin. The camera’s shots of the space in front of the newly built Pei Exhibition Hall are constantly exposed on the internet and Sapountzis exploits this by using the webcam to record his frenetic activity in which he creates geometric drawings using black tape which he lays on the snow.

EDDO STERN

Born in Tel Aviv, Israel. His working interests are in structures of narrative and documentary, fantasies of history and technology, cross-cultural representation, and the phenomenological and cultural expanse of computer games. He works discriminately with a wide variety of media—computer games, electronic devices, software, video, sculpture and performance. His work has been shown internationally at new media and film festivals, museums, galleries, and game conventions. In 2000 he started «C-level,» a cooperative artist-run new media lab and art space in LA's Chinatown; currently lives near Los Angeles.
Vietnam Romance is compiled from the sources available exclusively on the computer desktop environment - games, graphics and music. A remix of the Vietnam war experience with a MIDI soundtrack and computer game clips, Vietnam Romance is a tour of nostalgia for romantics and deathmatch veterans. ...Feel the Nam, Feel the elephant grass, Feel the red clay, Feel the cong, Feel the rain, Feel the Nam. Vietnam Romance (2003, running time 19:30) begins with a clip from Grand Theft Auto: Vice City that featured a military-like dock setting filled with dark-haired prostitutes who could be viewed as Asian. The soundtrack is Nancy Sinatra’s “These Boots are Made For Walking,” famously used by Kubrick in Full Metal Jacket. First-person shooters provide much of the footage, but other scenes also use helicopter simulators and appropriate soundtracks to refer to M.A.S.H. and Apocalypse Now.
www.eddostern.com

 

PATRICK TUTTOFUOCO
Patrick Tuttofuoco (1974) lives and works in Milan. His work receives increasing international attention. Tuttofuoco took part in various exhibitions including in the Stedelijk Museum voor Aktuele Kunst in Ghent, the Centre d’Art Contemporain of Geneva, the Contemporary Art Centre in Vilnius, the Biennial of Venice in 2003. In 2004 he had a solo exposition 'My Private #2' in Via Pasteur, Milan.


The notion of "Revolving Landscape" suggests movement and change, and indeed, the show is the result of an impressive, three-month journey around the globe, taken by Tuttofuoco and three friends -- two film directors, Mattia Matteucci and Damaso Queirazza, and one architect, Andrea Pozzato. From October 2005 to January 2006, they voyaged from Milan to Mumbay, Udaipur, Jaipur, New Delhi, Bangkok, Kuala Lumpur, Jakarta, Singapore, Shanghai, Beijing, Seoul, San Francisco, Las Vegas, Los Angeles, Mexico City, São Paulo and Rio de Janeiro. Their aim was nothing less than a survey of the contemporary city, done in the context of an examination of the future of urbanization. During the course of their globetrotting, Tuttofuoco and his friends made extensive observations, and collected a quantity of writings, photographs and other materials, including several interviews with architects and anthropologists.