Game Performance: Operation Jane Walk by Total Refusal
Event organized as part of Patchlab Festival 2020: Connected.
An experimental performance by the Total Refusal collective from Vienna, in which the digital war zone of a video game is appropriated by artistic intervention.
Operation Jane Walk takes place in the dystopian multiplayer space of Tom Clancy’s: The Division (Ubisoft Entertainment 2016). The militaristic environment of the video game has become a space for an artistic performance, which the artists, using the rules of a computer program, used for a narrative tour in New York. The urban strollers avoid the combat whenever possible and become peaceful tourists of a digital world, which is a detailed replica of Midtown Manhattan. The performers, accompanied by two guests in front of the audience, promenade the digital battleground, exploring the possibilities (and impossibilities) of new media technologies. While walking through the post-apocalyptic city, issues such as architecture history, urbanism and the game developer’s interventions into the urban fabric are discussed.
The event will be broadcast on en.patchlab.pl and on Twitch, YouTube and Facebook.
Additionally, there was a plan to broadcast the event on the big screen in Hevre+1, but due to the current situation, we do not want to expose anyone to risk, so this option is cancelled."
The project is organised in cooperation with the Austrian Cultural Forum in Warsaw.
The Patchlab Digital Art Festival will be held for the ninth time on October 23-25, 2020 and will present contemporary audiovisual artists, the latest technologies and a selection of interactive art works. The hybrid format of most events will enable participation both online at en.patchlab.pl and in augmented and virtual reality on smartphone screens.
The main theme of this year's edition of the Patchlab festival is CONNECTED. Today we connect mainly via the Internet, which has become an effective and immediate form of communication. But most of all we were connected by the new situation in which we all find ourselves and the limitations caused by the pandemic. We join forces with partner institutions around the world to think about the future of shared public spaces, cultural events and everyday life in an era of accelerated development of Internet communication, when a digital revolution is taking place right in front of our eyes.
