A graduate of the Political Sciences Institute and a Master in Management of cultural projects, Isabelle Arvers specializes in new media in 1993. Pioneer in the field of game art in France , she curated Playtime – the gaming room of Villette Numérique (2002), as well as the net.art gallery on “sound games”.
Her following exhibitions and projects then presented the video game as a new language and as a medium for artists: Organizing a gameboy music concert at Project 101, Paris, 2004 She also curated Mind Control, a net.art exhibition for Banana RAM Ancona, Italy , 2004, and Node Runners game festival, for the Region Ile de France in Paris, 2004. Curator Reactivate under Gametime festival , Melbourne, Australia 2004 / 2005.
Exhibition curator No Fun ! Games and the gaming experience for Piksel festival in Bergen, Norway , 2005. Playing Real, 2007 Gamerz 2009-2014 Digital Lounge at Maison Populaire , Montreuil , and Game Heroes at the Alcazar , Marseille, 2011.
From 2005, she is interested in machinima ( films made within virtual worlds using real-time 3D engines or video games) and organizes screenings at the Centre Pompidou, at festivals in France and abroad (Czech Republic , Brazil, Canada) since 2009, she organizes workshops initiation or completion of machinima , to democratize a practice that transforms an object of mass consumption into a production tool.
In partnership with the Gamerz Festival in Aix -en- Provence, she designed the first machinima exhibitions in art gallery and continues to work with curatorial exhibitions of independent games, game art and retrogaming in France with Dream Games, Games Policy, Games Reflexions and abroad with Evolution of Gaming, coming to Vancouver in August.
In 2013 she curated the antiAtlas of Borders, a touring exhibition on the borders in the 21st century that will be shown in Berlin as part of Secession in september 2014 and in the Art of bordering, an exhibition hosted at the MAXXI in Rome in october 2014. She is also in charge of the End of the Map exhibition which will be presented in Paris during the fall 2015.
She has written for magazines like Arcadi, Amusement, MCD, Digitalarti, Etapes Graphiques and published critical essays on the work of game artists such as Matteo Bittanti or Axel Stockburger. Finally, she published an article on the machinima at MIT Press in 2010 : “Cheats or glitch , voice as a game modification in Machinima” in VOICE Vocal Aesthetics in Digital Arts and Media , Edited by Norie Neumark , Ross Gibson and Theo Van Leeuwen and was interviewed in “Understanding Machinima , Essays on Filmmaking in Virtual World” published by Jenna NG editions Bloomsbury in 2013.
Projects
