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Curated by Eddo Stern

Light Industry
55 33rd Street, 3rd Floor
Brooklyn, NY
www.lightindustry.org

April 8, 2008 at 8pm

Artist Eddo Stern presents a screening of fan-made machinima from the massively multiplayer online game World of Warcraft, focusing on videos that operate outside the traditional reverence of fan art and the game world's own parameters, such as those dealing with real-life death, pornography, and drugs. While only dubiously subversive, they nevertheless reflect a compelling phenomenon, one in which a more hermetic idea of "fantasy" as cordoned-off reality (seen in hardcore role playing) is being replaced by pseudo-fantasy genre games like WoW that spill over into the real world, and vice versa, through the homebrew manipulations of its multitudinous fan base.

Featured titles, among others, will include:

Rest in Peace Ignoramus
Amongst Fables and Men
Serenity Now
Drakedog's Suicide
Where Evil Grows
Welcome to Exploration (DOPEFISH)
Sex Junkie (French)
Broadcast Yourself (Gunter Soundtrack)
Wowsexual
Tribal Gnome

Stern will also be showing his recent video Best… Flame War… Ever… (King of Bards vs. Squire Rex, June 2004), which recreates an argument about degrees of expertise within the computer fantasy game Everquest, as followed by the artist in June 2004 on the Alkhazam online gaming message boards. Rendered in 3D animation at once elaborate and oblique, it serves as a spot-on ethnography for a particular slice of 21st century nerd culture and the thorny political terrain that surrounds it.

Tickets - $6, available at door.

About Eddo Stern

Eddo Stern is an artist and game designer. He was born in Tel Aviv, Israel, and lives in Los Angeles. He works on the disputed borderlands between fantasy and reality, exploring the uneasy and otherwise unconscious connections between physical existence and electronic simulation. His work explores new modes for narrative and documentary, experimental and multidisciplinary computer game design, and cross-cultural representation in new media. He is the founder of the now-retired art and technology cooperative C-level, where he designed and co-produced the experimental computer gaming projects Waco Resurrection, Tekken Torture Tournament, Cockfight Arena and LA MOOd. He is currently developing Darkgame, a sensory deprivation computer game. His work has been widely exhibited at international venues including the Tate Gallery Liverpool, the Walker Art Center, Museo Nacional Centro De Arte Reina Sofia, E3, GDC, Kunsthalle Düsseldorf, the ICA London, the New Museum of Contemporary Art, ICC Tokyo, and the Art Gallery of Ontario.

www.eddostern.com

About Light Industry

Light Industry is a new venue for film and electronic art in Brooklyn, New York. Developed and overseen by Thomas Beard and Ed Halter, the project will begin as a series of weekly events in Sunset Park this spring and summer, each organized by a different artist, critic, or curator. Conceptually, Light Industry draws equal inspiration from the long history of alternative art spaces in New York as well its storied tradition of cinematheques and other intrepid film exhibitors. Through a regular program of screenings, performances, and lectures, its goal is to explore new models for the presentation of time-based media and foster a complex dialogue amongst a wide range of artists and audiences within the city.