Expand Your Territory: Games beyond Merchandise Event

SUBOTRON arcademy

Christian Bazant-Hegemark
artist and curator

Game developers care about releasing games: they strongly focus on the creation of interactive experiences happening on screens. Consequently, their content rarely leaves the screen: if so, it?s mostly for merchandise purposes, and within the rules of merchandise. This way, potentially complex game identities get trivialized, becoming thinned-down versions of themselves. Since this is the industry?s status quo, we don?t tend to question it.
This presentation shows why it makes sense to expand your creative vision beyond the ingame experience, and how to expand existing merchandise dynamics. By showing how pop culture and fine arts appropriate games (and get appropriated in games), it also shows how specific game developers already made their game inhabit physical spaces – and how an in-depth knowledge of your work helps to maintain creative control over the outcome.

Biography
After working as programmer at Rockstar Vienna (2000-2006), Christian Bazant-Hegemark changed industries and studied painting at the Academy of Fine Arts Vienna (Gunter Damisch, Daniel Richter, Harun Farocki, 2006-2011), after which he wrote a PhD thesis on painting and digital technologies (Elisabeth von Samsonow, Elisabeth Thun-Hohenstein, 2011-2015). Since 2011 he curated over thirty exhibitions, using painting as medium of exploration. He currently researches creative processes ?independent of their media, and tries to get game developers to understand fine arts as experimental playground.