ENTANGLED NETWORKS 1: Players

Curated by Miranda Mungai

2 November 2023

Tickets

Players, the first Screening and discussion, focuses on community. We will examine our individual and collective engagement with video games, and how the gamification of our work and leisure presents an obstacle to community building. We will also look at the potential of using alternative video games to reclaim digital agency at the interpersonal level.

We will start this session with a viewing of A Wider Screen (Joe Hunting, 2019), a short VR documentary exploring how virtual embodiment affects the way we socialise, love and express ourselves.

Stay with us afterwards for a discussion with game artists v buckenham and Sjef van Beers about virtual sociality and what we can learn from alternative gaming cultures. Buckenham’s practice combines a playful attitude to sociality with an accessible methodology for alternative game building. Van Beers’ recent research project Gamer Keyboard Wallpiece #1 considers the toxic gaming cultures that have developed in the wake of the GamerGate online harassment campaign, and the new modes of sociality that have emerged to counter this phenomenon.

This series of three Screening and discussion events examines our networked society through the lens of three themes: community, categorisation and commodification. Each event explores one of these interconnected themes through the screening of a short film followed by a discussion. Together, we will examine the increasingly opaque ways in which our data is being used. In the communal, non-hierarchical discussion that follows each screening, we will try to re-imagine our world of data as a world of possibility, and begin to understand how we might reclaim our digital agency.

The short films are our tools and departure points for these discussions. We will think through each film collectively, and consider the themes and possibilities it presents.

TICKET FOR THIS PROGRAMME

What else is on Thursday?

Check the timetable to visit more programmes with your Festival Pass (5-days) or Day Pass (1-day). With the passes you can also visit the festival exhibition Our Terms, Our Conditions at the IMPAKT [Centre for Media Culture] and Fotodok/Casco.

Thursday day pass 5-day festival pass

For more information on the festival tickets please see here

Miranda Mungai v buckenham Sjef van Beers

Miranda Mungai

― Curator

Miranda Mungai is a film curator, events producer and facilitator with an interest that lies at the intersection of sociality, new media, and short, experimental non-fiction film. She engages with the potentiality that emerges from the synergy between film, neutral exhibition spaces, and non-hierarchical, generative discussion. She has a first class degree in Film Studies from King’s College London and has worked for the London Short Film Festival, Open City Documentary Festival, Sheffield Documentary Festival and various arts institutions, community projects and activist networks in the UK.

v buckenham

― Speaker

v buckenham is an artist who works with technology & play. They like to explore generative systems, and they like to make tools that let other people explore generative systems. They are currently at work on Downpour, a creation tool for hypertext collages. Previously, they have worked on the award-winning video games Beasts of Balance, Mutazione and Panoramical, as well as co-founding the games festival Now Play This.

Sjef van Beers

― Speaker

Sjef van Beers is a visual artist. In his work he interprets online culture. By (re)arranging collected material, such as images, videos and texts, he constructs new narratives, or unveils hidden ones. In his works Gamer Keyboard Wall Piece #1 and Keypad series he reimagines the online stereotype of the gamer and constructs a new political identity for him. Sjef is also the co-founder of Significant Content, a video and event series platforming online creators, and program maker at The Hmm, an organisation focussing on internet and digital culture.

Festival 2023