Samorost 3
Prague-based Amanita Design, creators of the award-winning Mechinarium, recently released what may be their best game yet: Samorost 3. This deeply immersive puzzle game spans the ecosystems of 9 unusual planets as you encounter strange inhabitants and unlock increasingly complex secrets to advance to the next level. Amanita Design’s approach to creating completely non-verbal/non-textual games relies heavily on intuition, sound design, and symbolism to create environments that are practically interactive artworks.

Botanicula
FILE FESTIVAL
FILE GAMES

“Botanicula” is a point-and-click game in which five small tree beings, who are friends, try to save the last seed of the tree that is their home and is infested by malignant parasites.

Machinarium
File Festival – Games

The Witness

FILE 2024 | Installations
International Electronic Language Festival

Image activated by augmented reality, where 3D animated subjects and scenarios are integrated into a physical photograph. Inspired by the work of Carl Jung, the image is part of a larger series that explores themes such as identity, introspection and transformation. Through AR, game elements were introduced into the piece, offering virtual content unlockable through interactions.

Bio

Camila Magrane is a Venezuelan-American visual artist known for her augmented reality images, integrating 3D animated scenes and subjects into physical photographs. With experience in video game development and a passion for analog photography, she explores the dialogue between the virtual and physical worlds. Magrane’s images are inspired by surrealist compositions and reference the graphic hyperrealism of contemporary video game design.

BOB

Cheng’s work explores mutation, the history of human consciousness and our capacity as a species to relate to change. Drawing on principles of video game design, improvisation and cognitive science, Cheng develops live simulations – virtual ecosystems of infinite duration, populated with agents who are programmed with behavioural drives but left to self-evolve without authorial intent, following the unforgiving causality found in nature.

Photo: Andrea Rossetti

File Festival
Paul Robertson is an Australian animator and digital artist who is known for his pixel art used in short films and video games. He is mostly known for Scott Pilgrim Vs. the World: The Game and the recent release, Mercenary Kings. Apart from his seasoned career as a game designer and movie creator, Robertson has been recently spotted on Tumblr with these GIFS. His interest in inserting flashing neon colors, geometric shapes, Japanese character animation, and 1990′s computer imagery, deems his work as heavily influenced by the Seapunk/Vaporwave aesthetic.

line-wobbler
file 2019
‘Line Wobbler’ is a one-dimensional dungeon crawler with a custom controller made out of a steel spring and a five-metre long LED strip display. The entire game runs on an Arduino, with sound, particle effects and 120+fps. ‘Line Wobbler’ is an award-winning experiment in minimalism in game design, making use of novel input mechanics, retro sound, and the incorporation of physical architectural space into the game. In the game, players navigate obstacles and fight enemies to reach the exit, in a series of increasingly difficult levels. Movement is controlled by bending the Wobble controller forward and back, while enemies are attacked by flicking the spring at them. Obstacles such as lava fields, conveyor belts and slopes challenge the navigation skills of the player.

Tantalus Quest
file festival
Game designer Fabiano Onça conceived the game, in which people must fill geometric shapes with their own silhouettes (as captured by webcams hanging from the ceiling): Software was built with OpenFrameworks, which is to C++ what Processing is to Java. A prototype was built with Flash (AS3), but it was slow — reading pixel values (BitmapData.getPixel) can be processor-heavy. Thanks to OpenFrameworks, porting the AS3 code to C++ was quite easy. The application is very simple: the images captured by the cameras are brightened, blurred and thresholded, resulting in black blobs. The amount of blob pixels inside the geometric shape count as positive points and the pixels outside the geometric shape count as negative points.

朱利安·奥利弗
줄리안 올리버
ג’וליאן אוליבר
ジュリアン・オリバー
Джулиан Оливер
Levelhead
FILE FESTIVAL
LevelHead is a spatial memory game. The game takes its inspiration from the “Philosphical Toys” of 18th/19th century Europe and the memory systems (“memory loci”) of the ancient Greeks. levelHead uses a hand-held solid-plastic cube as its only interface. On-screen it appears that each face of the cube contains a little room, each of which are logically connected by doors. In one of these rooms is a character. By tilting the cube, the player directs this character from room to room in an effort to find the exit. Some doors lead nowhere and will send the character back to the room they started in, a trick designed to challenge the player’s spatial memory. Which doors belong to which rooms? There are three cubes (levels) in all, each of them connected by a single door. Players have as a goal to move the character from room to room, cube to cube, in an attempt to find the final exit door of all three cubes. If this door is found, the character will appear to leave the cube, walk across the table surface and vanish. Then the game starts over.

IN THE WORLD OF HANAFUDA
IN THE WORLD OF HANAFUDA CARDS is a photographic, video and set design installation exhibition created by Eliška Sky Kyselková. The exhibition project intends to be a gate and homage to Japanese aesthetics and the beauty of nature. The visuals are inspired by Japanese card game Hanafuda, where each set of cards graphically portrays one month of the year with fauna & flora of that season.

Inside
Inside expands on the concepts and scope of its predecessor in wildly creative ways, and it’s so immaculately designed and constructed from top to bottom that it almost feels suitable for display in an art museum. This is one hell of a followup
FILE GAMES 2017

Internal Collection yellow silk dress based on ligaments
Merging anatomy, fashion, and technology, each piece is created by hand and digital manufacturing technologies. By depicting designs inspired by anatomy, this work communicates that, when we share our likeness and what is going on inside of us, an opportunity is offered for finding beauty within ourselves and connection with others.

ديفيد كروننبرغ
大卫·柯南伯格
데이비드 크로넨버그
דיוויד קרוננברג
デビッド·クローネンバーグ
ДЭВИД КРОНЕНБЕРГ
eXistenZ
cinema
David Cronenberg’s eXistenZ is a creepily downbeat near-future techie thriller, starring Jennifer Jason Leigh as Allegra Geller, the super-cool games designer, who has just unveiled “eXistenZ”, a game you plug directly into your neuro-system and play in the infinite cyberspace of your mind.

Full Body Games
file festival

Full Body Games is an interactive installation that allows users to engage in an unencumbered, full body gaming experience. The Full Body Games system projects the user’s silhouette in front of them in relation to simple graphic game objects with which they can interact. The user can select from four different games: Color Shooter, Two Touch, Duck and Jump, and Sorter. All games were designed to be quick, simple, intuitive and encourage dramatic movement.

The Dark Side Of The Moog 8

Pete Namlook (aka Peter Kuhlmann) and Klaus Schulze developed and nurtured The Dark Side of the Moog series. The Dark Side of the Moog 5 also features Bill Laswell. (He has collaborated on four of the CDs.) One of the coolest things on this disc is a 14-second intro by Robert Moog himself. Namlook, Schulze, and Laswell used “Adam’s Psychedelic Brunch” as their base track title, a play on Pink Floyd’s “Adam’s Psychedelic Breakfast” from Atom Heart Mother. And, as listeners expect, this CD features the sequences, atmospheres, and ambience associated with this trio. The soundscape elements flow seamlessly within the intricate sound design. Namlook, Schulze, and Laswell are always at the top of their game. This Berlin school offering will appeal to fans of Ron Boots, Edgar Froese, Ian Boddy, and Paul Ellis.

Algae Opera
singer: Louise Ashcroft
When we think of futuristic fashion, our minds often lean toward the minimalist designs of Star Trek or Tron. But maybe what we wear in the future will have more to do with what we eat than what we want to look like.
That’s the premise behind the algaculture symbiosis suit designed by Michael Burton and Michiko Nitta. The symbiosis suit is designed to make food for you as you go about your daily routine. A number of tubes, placed in front of your mouth, harness the CO2 you breathe and feed it to an ever-growing population of algae which lives in the suit. Stepping outside or sitting near a window provides the algae all the sun it requires.
Of course, the growing of algae isn’t the end-game here — it’s growing enough to eat three square meals a day of the stuff. The suit debuted at a recent event at the Victoria and Albert Museum in London. There, an opera singer donned the algaculture symbiosis suit and serenaded the gathered crowd. The suit created new algae populations during her performance, which audience members were free to consume after the presentation.

カロリナ・ソアベッカ
Каролина Собечка
sniff
File festival

Karolina Sobecka is a Polish artist that works with animation, design, interactivity, computer games and other media. Her work often engages public space and explores ways in which we interact with the world we create. Sniff is an interactive projection in a storefront window. When motion is detected along the sidewalk in front of the display, a virtual dog appears and responds the person’s behavior and gestures. The passerby’s movements are tracked by a computer vision system, and the dog behaves differently depending on how he is engaged. Like a real canine, big swift actions are interpreted as threatening, while slow and friendly actions directed to him are interpreted as friendly. He tracks and remembers the attitude of the viewer and forms a relationship with them over time based on the history of interaction. Depending on the nature of the relationship, he may bark, growl, roll over or even play fetch.

阿尼什•卡普尔
アニッシュ·カプーア
Аниш Капур
Arcelor Mittal Orbit
Award winning London-based artist Anish Kapoor has been given the commission of a lifetime to design the spectacular new public attraction in the Olympic Park. The stunning artwork, to be entitled ‘The ArcelorMittal Orbit’, will ensure the Park remains an unrivalled visitor destination following the 2012 Games, providing the key Olympic legacy Mayor of London Boris Johnson envisaged for the East End.The breathtaking sculpture – thought to be the tallest in the UK – will consist of a continuous looping lattice of tubular steel. Standing at a gigantic 115m, it will be 22m taller than the Statue of Liberty in New York and offer unparalleled views of the entire 250 acres of the Olympic Park and London’s skyline from a special viewing platform. Visitors will be able to take a trip up the statuesque structure in a huge lift and will have the option of walking down the spiralling staircase.One of the world’s most distinguished contemporary artists, Turner Prize winning Anish Kapoor studied in London, where he is now based. He is well known for his use of rich pigment and imposing, yet popular works, such as the vast, fleshy and trumpet-like Marsyas, which filled the Tate’s Turbine Hall as part of the Unilever Series, the giant reflecting, pod like sculpture Cloud Gate in Chicago’s Millennium Park and his recent record breaking show at the Royal Academy, the most successful exhibition ever presented by a contemporary artist in London.