Game / Videoart. A survey

The exhibition, part of XX1T, this year’s Milan Triennale, offers a selection of video installations made by international artists between 2007 and 2015. It examines the representation and simulation mechanisms, bringing up the new mode of perception through the filter of machinima.

“Game Video / Art . A Survey” focuses on the purely visual nature of the digital game and its potential as an artistic expression rather than mere disengagement.
Two decades after the emergence of machinima, Game Video / Art. A Survey invites the viewer to confront a visual panorama in transition, in which notions such as “specific medium” or “transmedia convergence” are simultaneously confirming and rejected. This paradoxical situation is confirmed in a form of expression which is able to absorb and reconfigure different languages, codes, aesthetics and technology. Example of appropriation and remix – a transmedia phenomenon that characterizes much contemporary art as the vernacular of popular culture – the machinima raises important questions about the authorial function, the production and consumption of images. Overall, the use of the same “source code” – successful video games like The Sims, Grand Theft Auto, Call of Duty – generates an aesthetic with recursive and unique, familiar and disturbing. The machinima repetition-with-variation produces imaginary memories, future failures, parallel realities, sinister fantasies, hallucinations consensual and grotesque situations, making it a reflective mirror and deforming of contemporaneity.