Gamerz report

I can’t seem to hold their flash website against the Gamerz festival. It remains one of my favourite events of the year.
Fondation Vasarely. Image credit: Luce Moreau
Dardex-Mort2Faim, The Forger, 2011. Image credit: Luce Moreau
Choeur Itineris concert. Image credit: Luce Moreau
Niklas Roy, Ping, Augmented Pixel. Image credit: Luce Moreau
The 7th edition of GAMERZ took place last November in postcard pretty Aix-en-Provence. As its name suggests, the festival presents video games, interactive works and a playground atmosphere but gaming is more a pretext than the whole raison d’Ãªtre of GAMERZ. The free exhibitions, performances, concerts and conferences embrace all kinds of art forms that refer to or use digital technology. So yes, Gamerz offers machinima and AR video games but also paintings, light performances and choir singers.
I like GAMERZ because it’s eclectic, because it makes me discover plenty of artists i had never heard about before but also because it reminds me that festivals should be left more often in the hands of artists. They take risk, follow their whim, trust other artists barely out of the academy, and care little about sticking to genres and formulas.
TRYONE, Le Canon. Image credit: Luce Moreau

TRYONE, Two Shoots, 2011
TRYONE, Two Shoots. Image credit: Luce Moreau

Talking about taking risks….
GAMERZ invited TRYONE and their Canon on wheels to shoot paint in Aix en Provence. Only that they surprised everyone by targeting the walls of Aix-en-Provence’s Art School during the night. I thought it fitted really well the building but the organizers of GAMERZ weren’t so sure the artistic intervention would be welcomed by the School.
Paul Destieu, Fade-Out, 2011. Photo by Otto-prod

ï»¿ï»¿ Paul Destieu, Fade-Out, 2011 (making of.) Photo by Otto-prod
Paul Destieu, Fade-Out, 2011. Image credit: Luce Moreau
One of the most popular pieces in the exhibition was Paul Destieu‘s Fade-Out, a video that records the progressive burying of a drum set under gravels. The gravel hitting the percussion parts produces a rhythm section, which rapidly turns into a sound and visual chocking. I watched the video a first time for the images and came back to it, just to take the sound in. The sequence shot proposes experimentation around the technical state of Fade-out, by materializing the decrease of sound and visual signal, until a complete silence and disappearance.
Monsieur Moo, Meule 2 Foin, 2011. Image credit: Luce Moreau
Monsieur Moo, Meule 2 Foin, 2011. Image credit: Luce Moreau
Monsieur Moo‘s Meule 2 Foin (french for haystack) is a big hay ball that emits loud sound when you push it. To turn the loud noise into a melody, visitors have to keep a certain, equal pace. It looks like the most elementary way to ‘interact’ with an artwork: you just have to roll it around. In fact, the work’s sole ambition is to cheer up visitors. However, once you’re in front of the ball, you realize it’s not going to be a piece of cake. First of all the hay ball is ultra heavy and you might need some help in order to get it rolling. Add to that that the surface around the hay ball is slippery and you’re in for a good sweat moving that damn ball around.
Mr Moo imposes a forced walk that illustrates his mocking analysis of mobility and interactivity issues in contemporary art.
Dardex-Mort2Faim, The Forger, 2011. Image credit: Luce Moreau
Le Faussiare (The Forger) by artists’ collective Dardex-Mort2Faim (Quentin Destieu, Romain Senatore, Sylvain Huguet and Stephane Kyles) is a robotic arm that counterfeits the autograph of famous artists. The work is intended to satisfy an audience that has elevated famous artists to the rank of major rock stars but also to set the artists themselves free from any unwanted social obligation towards the public. So far the robotic device only fakes Andy Warhol’s autograph but it will soon offer art fans a databank of famous artists’ signatures to chose from.
Antonin Fourneau, Oterp, 2011. Image credit: Luce Moreau
Antonin Fourneau, Oterp, 2011. Image credit: Luce Moreau
Antonin Fourneau, Oterp, 2011. Image credit: Luce Moreau
Antonin Fourneau was showing the work in progress version of Oterp, a mobile phone game using a GPS sensor to manipulate music in real time, depending on the player’s position on Earth. Players have to locate and capture sounds in their surrounding, the more sound creatures they catch, the more sophisticated the music becomes. I played with Oterp at the exhibition opening. It was fun to be that rude girl walking through groups of people having conversation and frustrating not to be able to catch a creature because that would have implied jumping into a pond. What makes Oterp stand from similar dÃ©rive-like games is the quality of its design. The music was created by Jankenpopp and Thomas Michalak aka T M. The graphic designer is Syclo. They all did such an outstanding job that players tend to stick to the game longer than they would normally.
Servovalve, Dipterous experience, 2011. Image credit: Luce Moreau
Servovalve, Dipterous experience, 2011. Image credit: Luce Moreau
Dipterous experience is an archaic visual process combined with a micrographic device paying tribute to flies… some fruit burst open so that you may enjoy it better. No idea how to explain this one clearly, i guess you just have to pop your head into Servovalve‘s Dipterous Experience.
Image credit: Luce Moreau

ELIZA meets an old Olivetti typewriter in Gauthier Le Rouzic‘s TypeWriterBot. Ask the typewriter a question and it will engage in a conversation with you, greeting you with a ‘hello, night bird!’ if it’s late, asking you about your hopes for the national elections if there’s a political election running at the moment and answering your most stupid questions with humour and astuteness. Reading through the printed conversations, it immediately appears that the typewriter is far wittier than the humans.
Image credit: Luce Moreau
Josh Bricker, Post Newtonianism (War Footage/ Call of Duty 4 Modern Warfare Footage), 2010
Isabelle Arvers curated a Machinima exhibition for GAMERZ. All the details can be found on her webpage so i’ll only highlight Josh Bricker’s Post Newtonianism, a two channel video that shows side by side images from the video game Call of Duty 4: Modern Warfare and actual war footage taken from cameras mounted on American military aircraft during the first Gulf War in 1991 as well as during the recent occupation of Iraq. There are bombing of vehicles, military targets, shooting of insurgents and oppositional forces. The sound track mixes the audio from the video game with the sound of a classified material released in 2010 by Wikileaks showing Apache helicopters killing two Reuters reporters and attacking, wounding or killing other targets on dubious grounds.
The pictures from both sources are disturbingly similar. Josh Bricker’s experiment is a simple but effective analysis of why images should be watched with a certain suspicion. The documentary value of this film is not only on what we see, but on how incapable we are to recognize the origin of the images our own society produces.
I wanted to embed directly the video in this post but YouTube first asked me to login to ‘verify’ that i’m 18 or older and when i tried to do so, the page said that “YouTube is not available for wmmna.com”. But here’s the link to the video and my blog will make do with the comment from the artist: