This year, we are also participating in the Pixxelpoint Festival of Contemporary and New Media Practices, which will take place in Nova Gorica from November 7 to November 17, 2024. The theme of this year’s festival is Speculation and Decay. With this theme, the 25th edition of the festival explores the potential of fiction to reestablish a relationship with our irreparably damaged world through an international exhibition at four venues, an experimental program of discussions, audiovisual and music programming, a series of podcasts, essays, and workshops. The Pixxelpoint festival is co-organized by the Cultural Center Nova Gorica and Aksioma – Institute for Contemporary Art Ljubljana, as part of the European Capital of Culture GO! 2025 Nova Gorica – Gorica. The festival is artistically directed by Janez Fakin Janša.

Our students are participating in the festival, where they will create their own computer and mobile games as part of the gaming workshop Controllers (led by Brin Žvan) and in the workshop The Void (led by Tommaso Campagna and Jordi Viader Guerrero). The results of the Controllers workshop will also be exhibited at our Academy, making the Academy one of the festival venues.

Opening of the exhibition Controllers (UNG School of Arts, Vipavska 13, 5000 Nova Gorica-Rožna Dolina):

November 7, 2024: 16:00-17:30 (opening, guided tour of festival locations)
November 8, 2024: 15:00-16:30 (guided tour of festival locations)
November 11-15, 2024: 09:00-16:00

Controllers

A Game Making & Design Workshop

Somewhere beyond the 69^th Call of Duty sequel lies a world of interesting games: games that have been played since dice were invented, games about queer culture, games that we make for friends as gifts, and games that your mom would play. In this workshop, led by media artist and game designer Brin Žvan, these are the kinds of games we are thinking of. The first day delves into the folk history of games, showing how minor changes to their mechanics can change their contexts and the ways we see them, and we create a board game. On the next day, we use the tool Downpour to create small exploration-based games, play with basic interactions and help us think of games in terms of their most essential units. Finally, on the third and fourth days we focus on Bitsy, a simple game-making tool which, despite its limitations, allows us to expand these boundaries while learning the basics of logic programming.

The results of these workshops are featured in the exhibition at the School of Arts, University of Nova Gorica.

The Void

Hybrid Pop-Up Streaming Studio

In this workshop, media researchers Tommaso Campagna and Jordi Viader Guerrero invite participants to use a pop-up streaming studio as an opportunity to reflect on and present their own work as a form of tactical media. Participants tackle questions like: How does your media production have social and material effects in the world? How can your online media production be an occasion to create offline encounters? And, vice versa, to produce new ways of inhabiting a stagnating online media landscape? The first part of the workshop introduces participants to THE VOID format and aspects relating to its technical setup. In the second part, the pop-up studio becomes the stage for a live peer-hosted event in which participants discuss their own practice in relation to the concept of tactical media.

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The project is part of the official programme of the European Capital of Culture 2025 Nova Gorica – Gorizia.