GAMERZ festival 2012

This year, even GAMERZ, an art&tech festival with a name that promises its visitors much joy and entertainment, didn’t want to turn its back to the times of fear and uncertainty we are living. The festival was as playful as ever but with a slightly darker tone and with a selection of artists whose works question the worrying changes at work in society.

Night view of the Fondation Vasarely. Photo : Luce Moreau – for M2F Créations

The opening of the festival took place at the gloriously Op-Art Fondation Vasarely, a museum designed by Victor Vasarely and containing some spectacular works of his. Sadly, the space is now equally famous for the state of disrepair of the artworks and of the building itself.

I’ve mentioned two of the works exhibited there already: Cécile Babiole‘s Bzzz! The sound of electricity and Benjamin Gaulon‘s Printball and i’m still working on a post focusing on the work of two young and ridiculously talented artists from Paris. Which means that i haven’t much left to say about the exhibition at the Fondation. I must however mention the stunning Salamander:

Photo : Luce Moreau – for M2F Créations

Pascual Sisto, Salamander, 2006

Pascual Sisto used stock images of explosions from the movie industry as “digital ready-made” and collaged them with the After Effects software. The potentially deadly explosions are turned into sublime, hypnotizing fire works.

I can’t find a way to embed the video on the blog so do me a favour and click over here to see the film.

The rest of the exhibition is spread throughout the center of the city of Aix-en-Provence. Let’s start with Paul Destieu‘s solo show at the Seconde Nature space because, year after year, my first question when arriving at the festival is “What is Paul showing this time?” And as always (see Project NADAL and Fade-Out) his pieces were simple and brilliant.

Révolutions pits against each other two different moments in the history of the audiovisual media: the beginnings of home-made cinema and YouTube. The artist transferred the loading circle of YouTube onto the silver band of a Super8 projector, an object nowadays obsolete. The history of home-made video draws a circle metaphorically and visually.

Paul Destieu, Révolutions. Photo : Luce Moreau – for M2F Créations

Another work Destieu was showing compiled scenes of duels from the Star Wars saga to create a fight made of light and sound. The dialogues of the duelists can be heard in the room but the only image of the duel is shaped by the light emanating from two video projectors. They face each other at a distance, each at another end of the room. Below, smoke machines give shape and materiality to the projected beams that emerge in the dark and look like the fighting swords of the Star Wars warriors. A moment of violence and anger turned translated in darkness and white mist.

Paul Destieu, DOJO. Photo : Luce Moreau – for M2F Créations

Apart from the screenings, games and installations, the festival also programed a series of performances. I saw a couple of them but the one that impressed me the most was by Feromil, the ‘post-apocalyptic one man band’. The artist gave a concert using a metal detector as his main musical instrument. The performance was very raw, and very physical. Try wearing a gas mask while holding and moving around a metal detector for half an hour over a bass amp and you’ll get the idea.

Performance by Feromil. Photo : Luce Moreau – for M2F Créations

There a video of one of his performance over here but i’m going to embed the one made by Jérôme Fino.

The room where My Computer Just Started to Smoke was exhibited at the Galerie Susini was filled with smoke that the computer was ‘enthusiastically’ inhaling, depending of the temperature variations of its processors.

The computer runs a software that navigates the internet exclusively through pop-ups that pitch porn, poker, and tricks that will make you rich almost instantly. The more pop-ups the computer encounters and opens, the more its processor heats up and, of course, the faster the fans are spinning. But that’s not enough. To further ‘calm down’ the computer also inhales the smoke of the hookah.

At first sight, the work created by the Dardexcollective might seem to be merely mischievous. But it is actually a comment on computer animism and on the internet, a new world that promises freedom but delivers equal doses of mercantilism.

Collectif Dardex, My computer just started to smoke, 2012. Photo : Luce Moreau – for M2F Créations

To be honest, i wasn’t expecting to see GAMERZ invade the venerable Musée des Tapisseries (museum of tapestry) of AIx-en-Provence but the organizers used the entrance space to display several experimental games people could play with.

Hommage a New York, by Florent Deloison, is one of them. The game was inspired by Breakout, the video game released in 1976 by Atari, and also by the self-destructive sculpture created in 1960 by Jean Tinguely with the help of engineer Billy Klüver.

In Deloison’s version, instead of breaking bricks, the player must destroy the computer code behind the game. You can never win and the game inevitably ends when vitals commands stop working. A big red button on the control panel is used to restart the game

Florent Deloison, Hommage à New York, 2012

Florent Deloison, Hommage à New York, 2012. Photo : Luce Moreau – for M2F Créations

If GAMERZ is for me the best festival to discover new names in art&tech, it is also a space where confirmed names are given ‘carte blanche’ to invade an exhibition space as they please. This year, Quentin Destieu and Sylvain Huguet, curators and founders of the festival, invited Rafael Rozendaal to spread one of his internet works onto the walls, ceiling and floor of the gallery of the Aix en Provence art school using mirrors and 5 video projectors. The experience of ‘walking inside’ a web page, moving through it, seeing your shadow cutting through solid chunks of colours is eerie.

Video this way!

Rafaël Rozendaal, Everything Always Everywhere. Photo : Luce Moreau – for M2F Créations