All are warmly invited to Screen Shots a series of talks with artists who work and experiment with contemporary technologies of image making and who investigate image as hybrid, networked and performed by human and nonhuman agents. 

The talks are funded by Humans and IT Research Centre and Digital Aesthetics Research Centre at the Aarhus University. The events are curated by Magdalena Tyżlik-Carver (Aarhus University) in collaboration with Galleri Image and Kunsthall Arhus.

Screen Shots with Gareth Damian Martin: Possible Spaces

Tuesday, 30 October, Kunsthall Aarhus, 16.00-18.00

The spaces of video games form one of the most complex, contradictory and strange bodies of architecture ever created. Countless worlds, some no bigger than a corridor, others many kilometers across, none of which we can truly enter. Each one seems at once useless and essential, a space that can contain no life, and yet which is derived directly from it.

The work of Gareth Damian Martin explores the strange contradictions of these spaces, photographing them as a method of engaging with their unique balance of the real and the virtual. In this talk he will present his own work with analogue and digital methods of photographing game spaces, as well as a wider history of conceptual photography which informs it. Touching on the recent trend of game photography as a popular cultural practice as well as its potential as a critical mode of understanding game spaces, Gareth will discuss how game photography can inform new conceptions of virtual Space.

Bio: 

Gareth Damian Martin is a writer, game designer and artist. He is the editor and creator of the games and architecture zine Heterotopias and his writing has appeared on Frieze, Kotaku, Eurogamer, PC Gamer and Rock Paper Shotgun. He was recently nominated for the prestigious New York Videogame Critics Circle Journalism Award and his work as a game photographer has appeared at London's Photographer's Gallery, and in the British Journal of Photography. Gareth is also teaches on the intersections of videogames and urbanism at The Bartlett School of Architecture, UCL.