Clouds Falling: Machinima by Ip Yuk Yiu
A film of the forgotten skyscape in the virtual reality of gaming
Exhibition Venue: 8/F, Foo Tak Building, 365 Hennessy Road, Wan Chai (Causeway Bay MTR Station Exit C)
Exhibition Date: 3 – 27 November 2016 (*Every Wednesday to Sunday)
Exhibition Time: 1pm – 8pm
* If you wish to view at other times, please make an appointment in advance
Local curator Jeff Leung Chin Fung and artist Ip Yuk Yiu proudly presents Clouds Falling, a major “Machinima” adapted from the world’s most popular first-person-shooter (FPS) video game Call of Duty (CoD).
“Machinima”* (game engine film) refers to virtual films produced by integrating scenes from video games. It is part of the expanding cultural phenomenon arising from the popularity of gaming, along with cosplay (costume play), “otaku” (a Japanese term describing people who are obsessed with animation, comics, video games and the likes), professional video game league, and video game commentating. Together, these phenomenon define virtual reality, which increasingly comes into dialogue, and often clash, with the physical world.
In Clouds Falling, Ip Yuk Yiu’s forth piece of work, the artist removes the characters and weapons from CoD, and then conducts a 24-hour real-time playback of the skies and clouds in the game’s virtual reality to produce a film comprises only of scenery shots. The focus has shifted from shooting to endless scenery of the sky, where viewers no longer focus on targets in front of them, but to look up to find a whole new horizon.
Clouds Falling is a breakthrough from the traditional format of film watching. Yet, it’s reference to the art of film also adds possibilities to the range of parallel worlds that runs alongside our physical reality – namely the virtual world or the cyber world. It leaves open the boundaries between the imagined and the real, while also reflecting the issue of wars – something prominent in the reality, through the lens of a virtual world.
Ip is one of the very few media artists producing Machinima in Hong Kong, using computer technologies such as programming and hacking. Ip received numerous awards worldwide and has participated in various international art festivals with his three Machinimas, namely Another Day of Depression in Kowloon (2012) which uses Kowloon Walled City as its backdrop, as well as The Plastic Garden (2013) and Clouds Fall (2014) that are themed around the lives on earth in a post-nuclear war setting. An extended version of Clouds Fall, his new work in this exhibition features an advancement in computer technology by replacing pre-recording with real-time rendering, resulted in a real-time film of a virtual sky-scape that goes on for 24 hours non-stop.
