Breedbeeld – Yanco: ‘Ludic Cartographies’
A ‘machinima’ programme curated by Dmitry Frolov and Valdimir Nadein
As the video game industry grows exponentially and the number of players keeps rising, people are spending an ever larger share of their time in virtual worlds. These spaces have their own boundaries and laws, and often simulate only fragments of reality. It is no wonder, then, that they tend to mirror our prevailing social order and political dynamics; which is precisely why they need to be mapped and analysed.
One interesting way of interpreting games from an artistic and historical point of view is machinima (“machine” and “cinema”): films recorded inside video games or made with game engines. These often take on a documentary character, capturing digital landscapes along with the processes and events that unfold within them. On the other hand, machinima allows filmmakers to recreate places that are hard to access in real life or that no longer exist.
The programme ‘Ludic Cartographies’ takes us through the politics and poetry of such virtual places. The films touch on a range of themes, from alternative history and media archaeology to military conflicts and territorial disputes, but they all share one thing: a noticeable tension between the way we actually experience the world and the way video games present it to us.
489 YEARS (2025, Hayoun Kown, 11′)
‘489 Years’ shows an animated version of the demilitarised zone between North and South Korea, one of the most dangerous and heavily armed places in the world. A former soldier describes the DMZ as a paradoxical place where intense fear and unconscious beauty exist side by side.
WORKPRINT: DE FACTO VELA INCIDENT (2023, Pastinaca Videotapes Plantation, 22′)
In 1979, an American satellite designed to detect nuclear explosions recorded a “double flash” where the South Atlantic and Indian Oceans meet. The incident led to decades of speculation about a secret nuclear test by South Africa and Israel. ‘Workprint: De Facto Vela Incident’, made within the game engine of Grand Theft Auto, places archival footage in a new context to explore the blurred boundaries between geopolitical reality and simulation.
LIKE AN EVENT IN A DREAM DREAMT BY ANOTHER – REHEARSAL (2023, Firas Shehadeh, 14′)
This short video essay examines how Palestinian gamers recreate life under colonial occupation in Los Santos, a fictional city in the ‘Grand Theft Auto’ game series that serves here as a virtual proxy for Palestine.
ANOTHER DAY OF DEPRESSION IN KOWLOON (2012, Ip Yuk-Yiu, 15′)
The video installation ‘Another Day of Depression in Kowloon’ examines how Hong Kong is depicted in a popular video game such as ‘Call of Duty: Black Ops’ (2010). The film is both a virtual field study and a digital city portrait.
GEOMARKR (2023, Leho Galibert-Laine, 22′)
This film brings two worlds into dialogue: the online computer game GeoGuessr, in which players guess locations from Google Street View images, and the work of Chris Marker, a filmmaker and multimedia artist who was fascinated by digital technology and travel.
In collaboration with yanco.
