Mit der Einführung des Computerspiels entwickelte sich eine eigene Kultur des elektronischen Spiels. Die Veranstaltungsreihe will Arbeiten von in Berlin lebenden Künstler*innen vorstellen, die sich kritisch mit den Computerspielen und ihren sozial-politischen Wirkungen auseinandersetzen. Parallel widmet sich das Filmprogramm in einer Reihe von Dokumentar- und Kunstfilmen dem E-Sport, der als Spezialfall des Spiels als Spiegel und Exerzierfeld der digitalen Netzwerkgesellschaft betrachtet wird.
The invention of video games created a new form of gaming culture. In the series "eGames", which runs from April to August, panke.gallery presents works from Berlin-based artists who use video games and related genres as a medium for art and critical reflection. Monthly artist presentations are accompanied by artist films and documentaries that relate to games, sport, technology, art, and eSport, considered as mirror and parade ground of digital networked society.
"Does the world exist when I'm not watching it?" And: "Where does this world end?" In Parallel II, Harun Farocki brings up some of the earliest and most fundamental questions of gaming. We are going to propose a few bits of extra material, in which non-filmmakers - gamers, rather - try to find concrete answers to Farocki's questions, and discover a series of new problems: the existence of other characters in the world, the distinction between "off the map" and "under the map", and the issue of technical defects in the territory.
Sebastian Lütgert (a.k.a. Robert Luxemburg) lives and works in Berlin as an artist, writer and programmer. He is the co-founder of Bootlab (2000-2007), Pirate Cinema Berlin (2004-), 0xDB (2007-) and Pad.ma (2008-), and was the co-organizer of several international conferences, like The Dictionary of War (Frankfurt-Munich-Graz-Berlin 2006-2007), The Oil of the 21st Century (Berlin 2007), The Summit of Non-Aligned Initiatives in Education and Culture (Berlin 2007) and Properties of the Autonomous Archive (Bombay 2011). His work has been shown in numerous exhibitions, among them Animations (PS1 2001, Kunstwerke 2002), Werkleitz Biennale (2004), Poor Man's Expression (Kino Arsenal 2004, Artists Space 2012), Van Abbe Museum (2006), Manifesta (2008), Gwangju Biennale (2008), Taipei Biennale (2008), Artists Space (2012), Documenta (2012, with Pad.ma), Istanbul Biennale (2015) and Pane per poveri (2017).
EMPIRE (2008–2012) by Philip Solomon
"Phil Solomon’s “EMPIRE” (2008/2012), an installation made in the videogame space of Grand Theft Auto, raises issues of memory and materiality as they pertain to the medium specicities of film and digital media. As a remake of Andy Warhol’s Empire (1964), the work addresses concerns pertinent to structural lm of the 1960s and 1970s, including, on the one hand, the material fragility of lm as a physical medium, and, on the other, the immaterial endurance of an idea of cinema. “EMPIRE” expresses structural film’s contradictory approaches to materiality in digital terms by using a videogame object that is temporally ‘indefinite’, as indicated in the work’s accompanying wall text. Additionally, as part of the series In Memoriam (Mark LaPore), “EMPIRE” is a work of mourning. As such, its indefinite running time offers a meditation on the temporality of memorials and the capacity of film, photography and digital media to realize the process of memorialization." Genevieve Yue
Parallel II (2014) by Harun Farocki
"Parallel II explores the borders and boundaries of the game worlds. The work follows characters attempts to escape the edges of their animated world by any means, and seeks to reveal what lies outside of the defined spaces and digital borders." Video Data Bank