FMAV Fondazione Modena Arti Visive opens the collective exhibition Is this real ? Art in the Age of Game Engine Culture by Valentino Catricalà .

What is our relationship with images and sounds today? How do we access information? What relationship do we have with our reality? These are the questions this exhibition seeks to answer. Our learning and knowledge methods are increasingly mediated by Game Engine processes, which, from a purely technological fact, have become a real cultural phenomenon that opens up important social and philosophical questions.

Game Engine Culture began as a series of software for creating and developing video games. With the rapid expansion of the digital society, such software has today gone beyond this specific function to become the raw material with which we access information. Although the expression still refers to the game, today the Game Engine completely covers the sphere of the digital world with which we interface with reality. This label can, in fact, include a very wide range of operations, such as rendering for 2D or 3D graphics, sound production and post-production, scripting, animation, artificial intelligence, machine learning, networking, streaming, localization support. On the one hand, therefore, images and sounds are conceived and created by machines for other machines through artificial intelligence systems, on the other hand the Game Engine, going beyond the video game, is the basis for the creation of any audiovisual, visual, sound experience , interactive: one of the key media of our time, the generating engine of our current culture. This new role of visual and audio information is what drives our actions, our economies, our world.

To understand these shifts, the exhibition proposes to look at the work of artists who for years, and ahead of their time, have been exploring and reworking this new territory. The concept, born at the MODAL Gallery of SODA - School Of Digital Arts in Manchester, was expanded on this occasion by focusing more decisively on the generation of artists, including Italians, born between the 1980s and 1990s, who therefore grew up already immersed in the media and in digital technologies. These artists investigate through works of sound art, robotics and machine learning , the role of digitization processes in many different ways: from political criticism, like DIS and Mishka Henner , to activism like Joshua Citarella & Jacob Hurwitz-Goodman and Audint ; from our relationship to nature, like Quayola , to Anthropocene issues, like Jakob Kudsks Steensen and Alexandra Daisy Ginsberg ; from the relationship with our cultural memory, like Oliver Laric and Auriea Harvey , to issues related to identity, like Federica Di Pietrantonio , and artificial identity, like Donato Piccolo .