GAMES WEEK 2013 BRINGS IN MILANO NOLAN BUSHNELL, THE FATHER OF VIDEO GAMES

Tribute to PONG and MOMA14 by Neoludica Game Art Gallery Founder of Atari and creator of PONG, Bushnell will inaugurate the new edition of the consumer show with a conference open to all fans. PONG by Delete, digital art on canvas, 2012 AESVI, the Italian games industry’s association, is pleased to announce that Nolan Bushnell, founder of Atari and creator of the historic video game PONG, will be the outstanding guest of Games Week 2013, the Italian consumer show dedicated to video games, taking place in Milan from the 25th to the 27th of October. On the morning of Friday October 25th, Nolan Bushnell will inaugurate the new edition of Games Week with a conference open to visitors of the show where he will share his vision on the future of the video games industry. Nolan Bushnell is considered the undisputed founder of this industry for having given life 41 years ago to a great classic in the history of video games: PONG. Two vertical bars and a ball bouncing between them to simulate a ping-pong game: these are the elements of the most famous video game of all times that, after quickly becoming the most popular arcade game played in American pubs, has conquered the world, changing forever the history of entertainment. Tribute to PONG in Milan with artwork of: Scaboro, Delete, Ribaudo, Roncella, Parisi, Mendeni, Roccioletti and GameSearch.it But how has the gaming industry changed since then? How will the latest technological innovations impact the market? How will the way of playing evolve in the next years? Nolan Bushnell’s motto is that "a good speaker learns as much as he teaches" and it’s with this spirit that he will make his entrance on the stage of Games Week 2013 to talk about the past, the present and the future of gaming, and to respond to the questions of the audience. A unique moment for all gamers and enthusiasts of the world of video games, as well as for retrogaming fans, which will have the unique opportunity to directly interact with the father of video games.

The Italian Game Developers Summit (IGDS) is an event dedicated to the community of Italian game developers to exchange their experiences, meet with each other and inspire from international speakers. The IGDS is organized by AESVI, the Italian Games Industry Association, as a parallel event ofGames Week, the Italian video game consumer show taking place in Milan.

MIRRORMOON E I SANTA RAGIONE_collettivo da Biennale_testimoni neoludici

Li avevamo portati alla Biennale di Venezia nel 2011, Matteo Bittanti e Domenico Quaranta avevano scritto nella sezione 'Italians do it better!!' di Neoludica-Art is a Game, edito da Skira per la cura di Debora Ferrari e Luca Traini. Paolo Della Corte, il fotografo che ci ha seguito per tutto il progetto essendo anche lui artista del gruppo, li ha fotografati nei loro momenti progettuali già nel 2010.

Fotonica, 2010, Santa Ragione, foto di Paolo Della Corte (C) 

Ora, dopo concorsi e premi, il nuovo progetto è pronto e il nuovo gioco, presentato anche da Amy-d  a Milano in giugno, è uscito su Steam e noi siamo neoludicamente felici.

MirrorMoon EP è un adventure in prima persona che ha come tema il perdersi in un mondo misterioso, e apparentemente abbandonato. Autori Paolo Tajè, Pietro Righi Riva e Nicolò Tedeschi (Santa Ragione).

E' anche un gioco su posti irraggiungibili e sullo spazio infinito. Usando strumenti simili ad armi trovati sulla superficie del pianete, il giocatore può orientarsi sul pianeta spoglio. La connessione con il suo satellite e le limitate azioni date a disposizione del giocatore sono la chiave per risolvere il mistero.

MirrorMoon interface

Il gioco è stato mostrato nel 2012 ai festival Fantastic Arcade di Austin e IndieCade a Los Angeles. Nel 2013 è stato selezionato come finalista nella categoria Nuovo Award nell'Independent Games Festival, primo gioco italiano ad essere selezionato in una categoria principale di questo prestigioso festival.

MirrorMoon EP is a game about mystery, discovery and exploration set in outer space.  Players’ space travels begin on a red planet and its unique moon and extend across galaxies. The single player portion of MirrorMoon EP blends adventure and exploration with navigation-based puzzle solving. The multiplayer of MirrorMoon EP lets players share Galaxy Maps with other players: the first explorers to land on a planet will be able to name its Star System and that name will be forever bound to the star for any other fellow traveler who encounters it.

Each Galaxy consists of a thousand Systems: it will be possible to fully discover the mysteries of MirrorMoon EP only while collaborating with other players.

Through the apparently indecipherable cockpit of an unknown spacecraft, players will be able to locate and travel to mysterious planets. Each planet has artifacts, buildings, and puzzles on its surface, hidden in astonishing low-poly sceneries. MirrorMoon EP is about solitude and the subtle thrill of feeling lost; it’s a tribute to space.

The soundtrack of MirrorMoon EP was composed by six amazing electronica artists Michael Manning, Nicolò Sala, Eric Hopton, Marco Adamoli, Ella Guro, Keith W. Blackwell and Sine Waver. They put together a total of 24 tracks and more than 30 minutes of original music. The soundtrack will be available in the next few weeks via BandCamp.

MirrorMoon was nominated for the Nuovo Award for innovation in games at Independent Game Festival 2013and was also part of the Official IndieCade and Fantastic Arcade 2012 selections. Since then, MirrorMoon has grown considerably. MirrorMoon EP stands for Extended Play, representing all the new content that we added on this final release.
MirrorMoon EP was recently selected as part of the main showcase at Fantastic Arcade 2013.

- Platforms: WIN, MAC, LINUX available on Steam and DRM free through Humble Store

- Price:  $9.99 $8.99 [launch sale, 10% off during the first week after launch]

Santa Ragione alla Biennale di Venezia con Fotonica

Paolo Tajè, game designer

"The first rediscover, in Fotonica (2011), geometric abstraction and the aesthetics of the first 3D simulations, used to design a game focused on traveling and exploring a metaphysical environment. [...] 
But video games are not just cultural artifacts: they are also a culture itself, a cult, a vice and a disease, a new way of living in symbiosis with the machine, and to adapt to it. For this reason, the world of gamers is interesting for artists as much as the world of videogames: in gamers they see, on the one hand, the revival of ancestral patterns, such as that of the mystic and the prayer; and, on the other hand, the prototype of a new stage of evolution (or involution) of the homo sapiens". 

(Domenico Quaranta in Neoludica, 2011)

SANTA RAGIONE           

Santa Ragione is a micro game design studio based in Milan, founded by Pietro Righi Riva and Nicolò Tedeschi. Previous notable works include the board game Escape From the Aliens in Outer Space, the arcade running gameFotonica, and Street Song, a music-inspired game created in collaboration with Kill Screen and Pitchfork.

MirrorMoon EP was developed in collaboration with Italian game designer Paolo Tajé.

New screenshots - Gallery / Download

Official Trailer - DOWNLOAD

Official Trailer (Streaming) - Vimeo / YouTube

Press Contact: info@santaragione.com

NEOLUDICA PHILOSOPHY

Art is technology, as much as the human being.

Since the beginning, game has been the enactment of its own destinies (plural).

A glowing red wire links the choppers made by homo habilis to the mouse of our pc, fossil handprints to touch-screens, with the dream of a future breach of any divisor screen.

It is a discourse that starts as abruptly as a flash (“αστράπτω”, “astrapto”, “lightning”, abstract thought) and 75,000 years ago was translated into a series of lozenges on red ochre, in Blombos. Later on, once the agricultural civilization was established, lozenges became bricks and artfully built a new artificial reality made of those angles, squares and rectangles of which we still love surrounding ourselves with.

There is no square without brick.

There is no way of defining reality without playing the game (dice or chess?).

There is no technology that does not answer art’s questioning.

Nuova Cueva de las Manos, Venezia 54. Biennale, photo by Game Art Gallery

Mythology gives eyes to statues, religion sits choirs in the theatre, the story of a squared chunk of wood gives birth to the picture (preferably rectangular). Paper reed rolls unfold and become codex, palimpsest, illuminated book, printed book. The square-angles door is now wide open, and from the darkroom to photograph, movies and the computer screen it is a short path.

For every step a new level: reality augmented by man’s articulate intervention, by the indissoluble osmosis between science, technique and art which is culture. Every time the same search for what we think we are, our representation of what we think of as natural or substantial: are we that chunk of wood? That rock? That mixture of color, silver nitrate, celluloid, bits?

We are multi-level. Artists, philosophers and scientists have always known it.

We surf the Internet acknowledging the existence of a platonic second navigation, of an Aristotelic level jump from potentiality to actuality, to the different angelic hierarchies or Dante’s Infernal circles, stricken both by Bruno’s heroic frenzy and Leibniz’s binary arithmetic. We tear up the veils of Maya with deep pleasure and no shame: we leave the same traces as Derrida. We are made of the same substance as a Flemish oil, and of the same powerful inconsistency as a film by Kulešov. Behind the ideal city of the Renaissance we see Daguerre’s Paris appear into light, and the 1889 World’s Fair, with the Eiffel Tower, photographed from bird’s-eye view on Google Earth. Let’s play SimCity.

We are also video-ludic, or rather NEO-LUDIC, because art comes into play.

For today the world is a video game, a total bet on our future, in which video game as a medium, knowingly sprung from its own fiction, may finally get out of the mirror, like Alice, in order to express its thought on a society that has never been so stratified and complex. The two realities – which sum up to form one augmented reality – are very much alike and cannot do without one another.

NEOLUDICA constitutes the first great attempt to define a coherent and strongly characterized perspective on this new, fundamental technological challenge art has embarked on.

Eva e Franco Mattes, Venezia 54. Biennale photo by Paolo Della Corte

Artists, creators, developers and players are then called upon to step up in class, and to accept a confrontation that will be aesthetic as well as ethic, and therefore will bring up more daydreams.

Today more than ever we are moved by Lewis Mumford’s words from his 1934 essay Technics and Civilization: “Thanks to machines, we now have a chance to understand a world we contributed to create”.

“Art is a game,” said Duchamp, “and games are art.” The admission of video games to the Dance of the Muses has enriched this statement: video games are art, and they have recently acquired a crucial influence on the other arts. From movies to literature, beyond music and visual arts. They are crossroads between different forms of production and culture and the anomaly of such clash is what makes them so interesting.

The goal of Neoludica. Art is a game 2011-1966 is to explore these relationships. Quoting Duchamp, we might wonder whether the video game is a celibate machine. Our answer is “No”. Not only does it require interaction, but it is as well a portable piece of art.

The event witnessed by this book is also portable: a six sections exhibit, depicting a path free from chronology but enriched by expressions and creations between hardware and software. Michel Foucault used to address the archaeology of thinking the same way as history addresses the archaeology of objects: while associating so different worlds yet animated by the same tensions, we opt for an archaeology of open aesthetics, as shown by the essays here collected.

At the beginning of the Third Millennium the heirs of Spacewar! have become the biggest cultural industry in the world, with a large catchment area and true opportunities for communication and education. Professional photographers, graphic designers, speed painters, animation artists, computer programmers… They all devote years to producing video games. We grew up with them, and many more are growing up at this very moment.

And yet, we all look inside a frame, the center of both knowledge and experimentation: artwork, portable console, screen or TV.

Art comes into play.

[Debora Ferrari, Luca Traini - 2010 -  Skira ed., Milan]

L'ASPETTO LUDICO DELL'ARTE CONTEMPORANEA, un corso per divertirsi con la storia e gli autori

L'ARTE è IN GIOCO, 110 anni di arte contemporanea ludica: 

da Dada alla Game Art

[corso ideato e curato da Debora Ferrari]

Op-Art di Vasarely

11 lezioni, una per ogni decennio dal 1900 al 2010 per capire la trasformazione dell'arte contemporanea e arrivare a scoprire l'arte del futuro, in realtà già presente: la Game Art, l'arte dei videogiochi.

Portal

L'aspetto ludico ha sempre affiancato le arti, ma oggi più che mai siamo dentro uno sviluppo rapido e immersivo delle arti, l'ARTEINMENT, una modificazione fra arte e intrattenimento.

mostra DADA, 1920

Come 100 anni fa per il cinema, queste nuove forme sono molto amate e diffuse e faticano a essere accolte dalla massa elitaria, ma sono parte della nostra vita culturale odierna e di una 'gamification' dell'esistenze che abbraccia ogni ambito.

Sala di Neoludica a Venezia, 54.Biennale Internazionale d'Arte (foto Paolo Della Corte)

Visione di opere, excursus sui personaggi, letture di manifesti, spiegazioni della concept art e visione di progetti indie che mutano radicalmente il concetto di arte interattiva.

Opera di Piero D'Orazio

Tetris di Alexey Pajitnov

A CHI SI RIVOLGE IL CORSO: ad appassionati di ogni età, a giovani studenti e artisti, a game designer che vogliono comprendere l'arte contemporanea per trarre ispirazione.

per info, luogo, costi e dettagli cliccare qui

[fra qualche giorno questo post sarà reperibile nella pagina 'Corsi e workshop']