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</Artist Diary. Game Engine Free Verse Exhibition 2022>
Distant x ODRA
In 2022, ODRA became a media partner of the Game engine free verse exhibition organized by the Dutch Institution Distant.gallery.The artworks of six Russian artists could be seen at a global virtual platform that combines immersive artworks of the artists whose practice lies in the fields of game engines, poetry, CGI and sound. In order to support artists, ODRA inititated an Artist Diary and captured not only the artists' understanding of the category of game art, but also their feelings about the time and historical period in which the exhibition took place.

In their diaries, six Russian artists reflect about their mood, understanding of game art and game as a concept of human existence, and also talk about virtuality as the exhibition takes place on a special platform. 'Game engine free verse' unites five art works by six Russian digital artists working in the field of game art. The exhibition has opened on June 20.
Margarita Skomorokh (rkktkk)
Yuliya Kozhemyako (Supr)
Kirill Makarov
Anastasia Koroleva
Ksenia Kononenko
DIARY: HOW DO YOU FEEL TODAY? SHARE YOUR MOOD WITH THE DIARY
DIARY: WHAT DO YOU THINK ABOUT GAMING AS A CATEGORY OF HUMANS’ BEING? WHAT IS A GAME PARTICULARLY FOR YOU?
Margarita: Game and play are of course universal categories of our culture, social, and psychological life. However, exactly because of this gaming as a category does not fascinate me that much. It is not gaming that makes computer games special.

Computer games are more about computers, and as an artist I am inspired by computational aesthetics. Gaming, in my opinion, plays a secondary role here: it is an effective way to explore this aesthetics since both phenomena are characterized by structure and interactivity.

Actually, structure is not always necessary. Some pieces of art labeled as games lack clear purpose and therefore structure, so they rather fall into the category of play. The main thing they have in common is interactivity, so, essentially, the thing we call computer / video games is just interactive digital art.

Though digital art does not need to be interactive, I believe that interactivity is the most straightforward way to experience the digital. In a nutshell, I care neither for game nor for play. Instead, I try to explore digitality by using interactivity as one of the main artistic techniques.
DIARY: WHAT IS GAME ART FOR YOU? HOW HAVE YOU COME TO THE PRACTICE OF WORKING WITH THIS MEDIUM? HOW TO DIFFERENTIATE WHEN A GAME IS ART OR JUST AN ENTERTAINMENT?
Margarita Skomorokh (rkktkk), Rise Shine Fall, 2017

DIARY: WHAT IS VIRTUALITY? DO YOU PERSONALLY PREFER TO EXHIBIT YOUR WORKS OFFLINE OR ONLINE? WHAT IS THE DIFFERENCE FOR YOU?
Margarita: I think the main difference between game as entertainment and art practice is… well, the purpose. If the primary purpose is entertainment, it is entertainment. If the primary purpose is artistic expression, it is art. There are no formal criteria, just this.

The distinction is not always clear; after all, art and entertainment are not mutually exclusive. Moreover, it also depends on players and their understanding of what art / entertainment is as well as their perception of a particular game. I personally prefer game art that is focused on the exploration of the medium and aesthetic experiments. As a rule, such games are not considered highly entertaining, but it is never about deliberately avoiding entertainment and fun.

After all, it is always a matter of taste. When I say that a game is ‘true art’, it is just a performative gesture, not some fact-based statement. What should be also kept in mind is that arthouse games would not exist outside a broader context of gaming, including its purely entertaining and competitive forms.
DIARY: IMPROVISATION. HERE YOU CAN SHARE ANYTHING YOU WANT WITH THE DIARY AND A WHOLE WORLD
Margarita: I think the best way to experience a computer game is playing it at home on a personal computer or console. After all, it is what games are designed for. So a virtual exhibition looks like something more natural. At the same time, an offline exhibition adds some new flavor to the experience. Maybe it is some kind of distancing, allowing us to see games in a new perspective. I would say these two formats are just different and both deserve to exist.
Margarita: Eight-bit milk and pixel honey. And a little bit of sadness.
Margarita Skomorokh (rkktkk)
I started playing computer games when I was around 20 years old, so they were not something I grew up with. On the contrary, it was a whole shocking new world that immediately fascinated me. And it is entertainment that initially sucked me into the digital world. Later I discovered The Endless Forest by Tale of Tales and was shocked again — this time by the possibility of artistic exploration going beyond the conventional approach using competition (in a broad sense) as the main way to structure players’ experience.

What I am trying to say is that in my personal experience the distinction between art and entertainment both matters and not. I prefer to create games that may be perceived as an opposite of entertainment, but I am inspired by all kinds of games and very well aware of the fact that all of them share the same medium, the same set of interactive conventions, and, more or less, the same audience and pool of classical ‘texts’.
DIARY: HOW DO YOU FEEL TODAY? SHARE YOUR MOOD WITH THE DIARY
DIARY: WHAT DO YOU THINK ABOUT GAMING AS A CATEGORY OF HUMANS’ BEING? WHAT IS A GAME PARTICULARLY FOR YOU?
Yuliya: Games help people to develop, learn new things, accelerate logical thinking, dexterity, attention, interaction with each other, rest, entertainment and so on. Also, games have great potential for creativity, self-expression and artistic expression.
DIARY: WHAT IS GAME ART FOR YOU? HOW HAVE YOU COME TO THE PRACTICE OF WORKING WITH THIS MEDIUM? HOW TO DIFFERENTIATE WHEN A GAME IS ART OR JUST AN ENTERTAINMENT?

Yuliya: As one artist I know used to say, ‘art games must be painful.’ In the sense that they don't have to be easy to understand or even to interact with. They can deal with complex themes both directly, through the story, and through game mechanics, user interfaces, and controls. Therefore, the player may be challenged not only to understand what the game is about, but also what to do in it in general and how. And the game will not necessarily help with this. For example, in ‘Mu Cartographer’, a game by Titouan Millet, most of the time is spent on learning its unusual interface. And to pass the episode Chernodyrsk from our ‘Overseas’ game collection with Rita Skomorokh, you need to figure out where everything is going and accept the inevitable.

This is one of the key differences between art games and games as entertainment - moving away from genre clichés, rethinking popular mechanics, or refusing to use them. As a result, the player may not understand how to handle the object, give it up, and write a comment that it is not a game at all, because it does not meet his/her expectations and ideas about games, or is not entertaining enough.

DIARY: WHAT IS VIRTUALITY? DO YOU PERSONALLY PREFER TO EXHIBIT YOUR WORKS OFFLINE OR ONLINE? WHAT IS THE DIFFERENCE FOR YOU?
Yuliya: I like presenting my work both online and offline. Especially since I have not only digital works, but also non-digital game-art on the theme of video games and their development. Once I had a small solo exhibition in which computers and big screens were combined with handmade objects made of cardboard and 2D prints. In particular, there was a huge cardboard blueprint with a possible algorithm for the behavior of the exhibition visitor. A thing that few people understand, except game developers, but it is tangible. And with the help of its tangibility it makes this incomprehensible more intimate and familiar.

At the end of last year I started the project "Post 3D painting" - painting, inspired by digital games and 3d-graphics. An exhibition of these works could have taken place offline, but the project is now on pause. The paintings in digitized form will appear in my art-game project "Yuha's Nightmares".
DIARY: IMPROVISATION. HERE YOU CAN SHARE ANYTHING YOU WANT WITH THE DIARY AND A WHOLE WORLD
Yuliya: As I was writing this text, I realized that I would really like to keep making games. It's pretty hard right now, but the game 'Yuha's Nightmares', which I've been making intermittently because of the "plague and war", is a project I really need to digest what's going on in the world and share my feelings. The Unreal Engine will take it all.

Yuliya: Right now I am excited about my emigration from Russia. It helps me not to drown in the hard feelings because of Ukraine and what is happening now in my homeland, Russia: the persecution of activists, the fight against dissent, the ban on anti-war statements.

After February 24, my image of the future disappeared, my usual activities lost their meaning. But the worries of moving and getting to know some wonderful people set out some prospects.
Yuliya Kozhemyako (Supr)
Yuliya Kozhemyako (Supr), La forêt, 2015


Game art for me has to do with reflecting on the medium of a video game, or thinking about anything, including other mediums, through the medium of a video game. It is a search for basics, typical traits, and their atypical use or violation. For me, though, game art isn't necessarily just about hacking, it's about the skillful and meaningful use of expressive media. But the point is that sometimes to achieve this you have to hack, disassemble, scrutinize the details, and perhaps find their hidden functionality.

As for choosing a medium for creativity... It happened gradually. Since childhood I've been fond of drawing and has been engaged in art school. Later I got interested in computer graphics and cinema and worked in game development as a second artist. But I wanted more. I wanted to create moving images where I could move around and interact with them. And one day I realized that this was video games. Since then I have been making my work based on this understanding of the video game medium.


Off-line exhibitions for me are often virtual, if they are not in my city and I don't have a chance to edit and see the exhibit. Sometimes I feel a pronounced insecurity that this exhibition or event is really happening. It's like my game is involved in some event, but it's like I'm not involved in it. But feedback is slowly catching up to me though - mostly people I know can write that they've seen my work at an exhibition, even a couple of months after it opened. In online game stores and social networks feedback is faster and easier to manage.

DIARY: HOW DO YOU FEEL TODAY? SHARE YOUR MOOD WITH THE DIARY
DIARY: WHAT DO YOU THINK ABOUT GAMING AS A CATEGORY OF HUMANS’ BEING? WHAT IS A GAME PARTICULARLY FOR YOU?
Kirill: Gaming provides an opportunity for prototyping social relationships and interactions, a kind of training for the real. At the same time, it immerses the user in the space of the imaginary, which he can percieve as safe, but this is illusory safety. It seems to me that there is an important difference between games in the real and virtual worlds, that in the first case, a person who plays is faced with limited physical capabilities and the rules of the game that take them into account. Accordingly, this person acts on the basis of these restrictions, while in the virtual environment it is limited by the written code, the will and imagination of the one who controlled its writing. But the illusion of limitless physical possibilities is appearing.
DIARY: WHAT IS GAME ART FOR YOU? HOW HAVE YOU COME TO THE PRACTICE OF WORKING WITH THIS MEDIUM? HOW TO DIFFERENTIATE WHEN A GAME IS ART OR JUST AN ENTERTAINMENT?
Kirill: For me, creating games is not the most important aim, but, in a more general sense, to explore the possibilities of tools that can be used, for creating games, but more broadly for modeling a virtual environments and the effects in social life that these environments and tools produce. This is precisely the difference, games occupy an important place, but game practices and methods of data analysis spread widely and more noticeably into very different areas of public life. If taking current events as an example, the level of mediation of military actions in Ukraine is higher than it could ever be possible before. It provides a wide range of tools for various organizations involved in war crimes investigations.

DIARY: WHAT IS VIRTUALITY? DO YOU PERSONALLY PREFER TO EXHIBIT YOUR WORKS OFFLINE OR ONLINE? WHAT IS THE DIFFERENCE FOR YOU?
Kirill: I think virtuality can be treated as a tool, I would not oppose offline and online, in my opinion these modes simply complement each other and their use is determined by the goals of the work.

DIARY: IMPROVISATION. HERE YOU CAN SHARE ANYTHING YOU WANT WITH THE DIARY AND A WHOLE WORLD
Kirill:
Kirill Makarov
Kirill:
Unveiled. 16.05.2022

All the artworks are part of 'Unveiled', 2022
DIARY: HOW DO YOU FEEL TODAY? SHARE YOUR MOOD WITH THE DIARY
DIARY: WHAT DO YOU THINK ABOUT GAMING AS A CATEGORY OF HUMANS’ BEING? WHAT IS A GAME PARTICULARLY FOR YOU?
Anastasia: The game is a great way to construct new realities and meanings. It seems to me that games are of great importance now, because it is a way to switch to another reality, to rethink what is happening, to escape from it a little.
DIARY: WHAT IS GAME ART FOR YOU? HOW HAVE YOU COME TO THE PRACTICE OF WORKING WITH THIS MEDIUM? HOW TO DIFFERENTIATE WHEN A GAME IS ART OR JUST AN ENTERTAINMENT?
Anastasia: The work of art is aimed at rethinking the modern context, posing topical issues and reflection. As for the practice of art games, this is a medium that allows the artist to work with a space that has no physical limitations. The difference between an art game and entertainment, in my opinion, is the mechanics of interactivity and the concept that becomes fundamental to the work. An entertaining game most often has some kind of simple scenario, you need to go through some tasks, perform some action in order to get points or go to the next level. The practice of an artistic game is much more complex in its structure, interactivity here becomes a way of exploring an artistic concept, the process of interaction with it, and not the final result, becomes important. As an example, I can recall my game ‘Soundwalk’. This game is built on the principle of a sound walk, walking through the space, the viewer hears the sound of this space. In each scene, there is one object from the latent space, approaching which, the viewer hears a sound characteristic of this object. As you get as close as possible to the subject, you move into a new scene while continuing the audio walk. This process continues while you play.
Anastasia Koroleva, Soundwalk, 2021
DIARY: WHAT IS VIRTUALITY? DO YOU PERSONALLY PREFER TO EXHIBIT YOUR WORKS OFFLINE OR ONLINE? WHAT IS THE DIFFERENCE FOR YOU?
Anastasia: I mostly work with physical objects and spatial sound installations, my focus is on sound and technological art. In the current situation, I am increasingly turning my attention to digital art, because the Internet space does not have such restrictions as the physical one, this is a real opportunity to continue making art and creating today. The virtual environment gives the artist a unique opportunity to interact with the whole world from anywhere. If we talk about games, when working with a virtual environment, the artist operates with a variety of tools: any number of spaces, interaction mechanics, the ability to include the viewer in the game process or give the opportunity only to observe the process. Any communication with the viewer becomes accessible and intuitive.
DIARY: IMPROVISATION. HERE YOU CAN SHARE ANYTHING YOU WANT WITH THE DIARY AND A WHOLE WORLD
Anastasia: Communication with the art community is especially important for me today, maintaining the relationships that exist within the community of Russian artists and curators and expanding it. We are going through a very interesting stage when all colleagues are dispersed around the world and integrated into the global community. I would like to believe that all the difficulties will help us continue to make art even more actively and find new opportunities for exhibiting our works.
Anastasia: Today each of us feels total uncertainty. It's hard to plan anything. Now I am rethinking everything that I did before and looking for new forms for myself. Internet art represents for me today a new solution that may be even more relevant in the future. I am interested in finding a balance between physical objects and spatial installations and the Internet environment.
Anastasia Koroleva
DIARY: HOW DO YOU FEEL TODAY? SHARE YOUR MOOD WITH THE DIARY
Ksenia:
DIARY: WHAT DO YOU THINK ABOUT GAMING AS A CATEGORY OF HUMANS’ BEING? WHAT IS A GAME PARTICULARLY FOR YOU?
Ksenia: It's all about the very notion of ‘play’, and it seems a good idea to start with trying to give it a definition, although, as we know, to quarrel with a friend you need to start talking about the definitions of concepts... What if I start with the other end of this sentence? I think I'm closer to the definition of existence as being in an act. As an action in the act. That is, I want to say I feel closer to the absence of being :) Let me explain. Staying in the act, we allow for contingency, we accept that there is something for which we do not yet have a record, no idea, not even an illusion of understanding. And this process of being in an act is a game, like playing with one's memory and one's life.
DIARY: WHAT IS GAME ART FOR YOU? HOW HAVE YOU COME TO THE PRACTICE OF WORKING WITH THIS MEDIUM? HOW TO DIFFERENTIATE WHEN A GAME IS ART OR JUST AN ENTERTAINMENT?
Ksenia: It happened accidentally! It turned out that effective work with the unconscious could be achieved with the use of the game mechanics, at the expense of allowing mastery of the Imaginary. I like that it is the only tool in which it is possible for different kinds of mediums to exist without competing for attention, though of course there is the issue of the body... but that is the issue I explore in games as an artistic practice. How do we affect the body? What do we do with the corporeal effects of language that arise from immersion in the play space? Can we modulate them at all, and if so, why? In general, my artistic and poetic practice in games is the practice of questioning. This is the difference from entertainment. In entertainment we are usually fed the answer :)
Ksenia Kononenko, Kirill Makarov. The Line, 2021
DIARY: WHAT IS VIRTUALITY? DO YOU PERSONALLY PREFER TO EXHIBIT YOUR WORKS OFFLINE OR ONLINE? WHAT IS THE DIFFERENCE FOR YOU?
Ksenia: It's Imaginary. I prefer all kinds of exhibitions – I am keen on looking and when others look at my work (or at me). There is a difference, as offline presence is body work too, and it's very different from ‘eye’ and ‘gaze’ work. But I don't share the preference.
DIARY: IMPROVISATION. HERE YOU CAN SHARE ANYTHING YOU WANT WITH THE DIARY AND A WHOLE WORLD
Ksenia: A little riddle poem.

I had long hair, short hair. There were several cats and some number of lovers, and unfortunately, there were non-lovers too. I once thought it was over, this February I thought so again, and realized that ‘it was over’, only in May. When in place of ‘it's over’ came ‘it's still going on.’

And it's still going on.
Ksenia Kononenko