November 20 2023 6:30 PM
FOTO/INDUSTRIA_GAME
MAST.Auditorium
Via Speranza 42
Bologna, Italy
Free and open to the public (please RVSP)
The digital worlds of video games are sites of vigorous creativity for a growing community of virtual photographers. Their cameras are coded algorithms that determine their survival by serving as weapons or vehicles through space and time, in addition to producing images. Concurrently, our everyday life increasingly resembles a peculiar game where images are the rules and rewards. Simone Santilli and Matteo Bittanti will discuss the intertwining of video games and photography, generating aesthetics and practices that go beyond the gaming domain. The roles of both media are in fact pivotal in contemporary society, impacting politics, entertainment, art, marketing, authorship, civic engagement, the environmental crisis, and the very notion of reality.
Simone Santilli (b. 1987) is a visual artist and founder of the artistic duo The Cool Couple with Niccolò Benetton, analyzing the processes of image production, circulation and consumption. TCC's projects have been showcased in Italian and international institutions and festivals, and in 2020 the duo was among the winners of the eighth Italian Council edition. Santilli lectures at NABA, IED and MADE Program. In 2023 he published My Favourite Game. Photography and Videogames, examining the practices, aesthetics and implications of the hybridization between video games and photography.
Artist, curator and scholar Matteo Bittanti investigates the cultural, social and aesthetic facets of emerging technologies, combining media studies, game studies and visual studies. An associate professor at IULM University in Milan, Bittanti has also taught and conducted research at Stanford University and at the University of California, Berkeley. His latest publications include the edited volume Reset. Politics and Video Games (2023), Game Over. Critique of Video Game Reason (2020), Phenomenology of Grand Theft Auto (2019), Performance, Spectacle, Streaming (2018, co-edited with Enrico Gandolfi) for Mimesis Edizioni.