[spectre] Games Art Networking Event 2008

Wed Oct 8 16:25:15 CEST 2008

Games Art Networking Event 2008

HTTP Gallery, Saturday 25th October, 12 - 6pm
http://www.furtherfield.org/gamesart_networking.php

Games Art does exactly what it says on the tin; art that uses, abuses 
and misuses the materials and language of games, whether real world, 
electronic or both.

The Games Art networking event will bring together artists, gamers, 
hackers, theorists, curators, activists, thinkers and doers all of kind. 
People who work and play with games, videogames and playful practice.

What Will Happen?

The event will kicks off with presentations by Corrado Morgana, Tassos 
Stevens (Coney), Ruth Gibson and Bruno Martelli (igloo), Holly Gramazio 
and Daphne Dragona, followed by discussion.

Refreshments follow, and we'll encourage you all to take part in an 
informal show and tell, so bring along some representation of your work, 
websites, objects, prototypes, whatever you have (within reason!) We 
will round off the event with an  open mic session of quickfire 
presentations; present your own or other's work, offer services and 
skills to other projects or make a request for help with getting stuff done.

Part of the London Games Fringe, a festival of alternative gaming events 
at the end of October 2008, organised by artists, academics, gamers, 
game developers, educators and creative professionals from a wide range 
of different media: www.londongamesfringe.com.

Please RSVP
Because of limited space we can only accommodate 40 visitors for this 
event. Please book your place- first come, first served. Projectors and 
wireless access to the Internet will be provided, please let us know if 
you have any other special requirements.
To find out more and book your place please email Lauren at furtherfield.org.

When and where?

Saturday 25th October 2008, 12-6pm

HTTP Gallery
Unit A2 Arena Design Centre,
71 Ashfield Road, N4 1NY
Tel +44 20 8802 2827

For maps and information about getting to HTTP
http://www.http.uk.net/docs/gettingto.shtml

More about the presentations

Games Art Curating it and Making it
Corrado Morgana, artist, electronic musician (retired) and researcher, 
will present his curatorial work with HTTP Gallery on the recent Zero 
Gamer and Game/Play exhibitions. He will also be presenting on his own 
practice which involves transgressive, emergent and glitch behaviour 
whilst utilizing game engine technologies. His recent work CarnageHug 
uses the Unreal Tournament 2004 engine to much gibbage and digital 
purposelessness. He will discuss how it came to be produced, it's 
implications as a piece of software art, the 'derivative work' and the 
value of faffing, fiddling, pootling and noodling.
http://gamecritical.net

Big Ball Bingo
Tassos Stevens from Coney will present their new 'future sport', Big 
Ball Bingo, a big outdoor event with a futuristic feel, commissioned by 
Lift and the Shoreditch Festival for Shoreditch people to play on 
Olympic Handover Day. This game is made from three connected components, 
a big ball game, a bingo game, and a very big ball game, and was 
developed through engagement with local community groups who already 
played these kinds of games. In advance of the Ballpark, Coney operated 
a fictional agency, Shoreditch Futures, run by time travellers from the 
year 2068 who were seeking the seed event of a future catastrophe by 
gathering stories of Shoreditch past and present from local people. How 
and why and what then happened will be revealed... More about Big Ball 
Bingo
http://tinyurl.com/4cs7rn

SwanQuake:House
Bruno Martelli and Ruth Gibson, London-based artists, working together 
as igloo will be presenting their site-responsive work SwanQuake:House 
which is currently exhibited at V22 basement. Through re-purposing media 
tools and combining them with re-modeled household objects, House 
simulates and reconfigures representations of an east-end underworld. 
The artists manipulate the space between the actual and the imaginary 
providing a counterpoint via the human form. Their practice is concerned 
with recreating environments and systems where coding joins hands with 
choreographies of the body. The exhibition is accompanied by a 
publication SwanQuake: the user manual.
http://www.swanquake.com/usermanual/index.htm

Pervasive Cheating
Holly Gramazio will be talking about Pervasive Cheating. Games that run 
in the real world - whether you call them pervasive games, street games, 
urban games, or anything else - can come up against a few particularly 
awkward problems. Cars that can genuinely run people over, for one; 
unreliable weather, for another; and loopholes in the game world that 
it's really, really hard to close. Is there any way to stop people 
cheating at pervasive games? What counts as cheating - and do the 
cheating players agree? In a world filled with taxis, telephones, and 
GPS, is there any point in making rules about the technology that 
players are allowed to use, once they're out of your sight? How do 
players cheat, and how does it affect the experience of the game, both 
for them and for everyone else?
http://severalbees.com/

Daphne Dragona is an independent new media arts curator and organiser, 
based in Athens with a special interest in the game arts field. She has 
been programme curator of Gaming Realities (Medi at terra, Athens, 2006), 
associate curator of Gameworld (Laboral, Gijon, 2007) and co-curator of 
Homo Ludens Ludens (Laboral, Gijon, 2008). She will be talking about how 
we define play today? What's the role of play in a world that is itself 
a gamespace? As the game industry becomes richer and richer and a game 
art scene is growing parallel to it, questions arise regarding play's 
real presence which seems to be under a process of continuous 
institutionalisation and commodification. Can we be critical about the 
projects, the exhibitions and the events we organise?
Interview with Daphne Dragona about Homo Ludens Ludens
http://tinyurl.com/44n89l

---------------

Schedule

12- 12.30 - Meet-up
Arrive, meet and chat over refreshments

12.30 - 2.30 - Presentations and discussion

2.30 - 4.30 - Break and Many to Many' Show and Tell - refreshments and 
informal 'many to many' show and tell. All guests are invited to share 
their work and ideas with each other using HTTP/Furtherfield resources: 
projectors, computers, walls, tables and outdoors spaces.

4.30 - 5.30 - Open mike session - Final 'one to many' presentations. 
Guests sign up for 5 minute spots to present their own or others' work 
or to offer or request collaboration.

5.30 - 6.00 - Round up sum up, final discussion, end, thank yous and 
good-byes, off to the pub!!

Who are HTTP?

HTTP is the Gallery arm of online media arts organisation 
Furtherfield.org. HTTP have been involved with curating Games Art 
practice for several years having presented lat years. 'Zero Gamer' as 
part of the London Games Festival Fringe and the previous years touring 
exhibition 'Game/Play' which explored playful interaction and 
goal-oriented gaming explored through media arts practice. The 
associated publication featured over 20 contributions from writers, 
journalists and critics and was reported upon worldwide in media arts 
journals.

http://www.http.uk.net/
http://www.furtherfield.org/
http://www.game-play.org.uk/
http://www.http.uk.net/zerogamer/