This month some of the ADMI game design and development students, through an ADMF partnership with Alliance Française, took part in an exclusive Machinima workshop with renowned French artist Isabelle Arvers. If you’ve not heard of Machinima, then you’re missing out! Machinima is a unique digital artform that uses real-time computer graphics engines to create a cinematic image, usually using video games.
Isabelle Arvers is a French artist and curator exploring for over 20 years the fields of digital art and video game, on formal as well as ethical and critical approaches. Her work explores the hacking possibilities of video games and mostly materializes in films called machinimas to be screened in on-site performative installation spaces. Arvers’ work grounded on collaborative experiences reflects all the possibilities of the “working together” processes. As a curator, she focuses on video game as a new language and as a medium for artists, notable exhibitions include Mind Control (Banana RAM Ancona, Italy, 2004), Node Runner (Paris, 2004), Playing Real (Gamerz, 2007), Game Heroes (Alcazar, Marseille, 2011), Evolution of Gaming (Vancouver, 2014)., UCLA Gamelab Festival (Hammer Museum, LA 2015, 2017), Machinima in Mash Up (Vancouver Art Gallery, 2016). In 2019, she embarks on an art and games world tour in non western countries to promote diversity of gender, sexuality and geographic origin and focuses on queer, feminist and decolonial practices. Working towards an exhibition and an international conference on post colonial game studies to be held at la Sorbonne in 2020, her reports on the research tour can be read online in Usbek & Rica, Poptronics, Immersion.
The Africa Digital Media Foundation has been collaborating with Alliance Française de Nairobi for several years now, to place interns, host events, and now make this first Kenyan machinima workshop happen.
The outcome of this workshop will be exhibited at the Alliance Française’s Jibambe Na Tech Festival of Digital Media that’s running until 30th November. Find the brochure here and get on down to the Alliance before the end of the month.