Top 5: Artists at the Modal Gallery’s inaugural exhibition

Open to the public from 24 Jun, Slip.Stream.Slip: Resistance and Velocity in Game Engine Culture is the inaugural exhibition at the innovative new space from MMU’s School of Digital Arts.

Celebrating the ways in which revolutionary technologies from engines like Unreal and Unity have shaped our relationships with images, sounds and interactivity, the exhibition collates the diverse work of international artists – five of whom we’ve picked out as creators to check out.

Cecile B. Evans | What The Heart Wants

Taking place after the fall of the internet as we currently understand it, Cecile B. Evans’ video installation follows omnipresent, infrastructural, conscious programme HYPER in an exploration of the person-to-machine interactions that ‘have come to define the contemporary human condition’.

Featuring cortex-shattering paradoxes, singular memories as sentient characters, robot caregivers and more, What The Heart Wants embodies Evans’ concern with the value of human emotion in society and its rebellion as it comes into contact with – and rubs up against – technological structures.

Jackob Kudsk Skeensen | Liminal Lands

Beginning in a slow, beguiling pulse, Liminal Lands employs interactive multiplayer tech to draw together physical movement and spatial sounds to produce a musical score created by its participants through their purest, most direct actions.

Played by four people at once, the game takes place in a ‘transitional zone where the fundamental energies of wind, sun, water and bacteria connect to the participants’ bodies in virtual reality’. Designed to encapsulate the metamorphic processes of life and technology, players progress through different elemental forms and perspectives.

Juan Cortes | On Vegetal Politics

In confronting the labyrinthine political issues around food sovereignty, deforestation and biodiversity in Latin America, Cortes tightens his focus on ‘the case of soy monoculture’. Drawing attention to the corporate transgenic war on amaranth, a once-benign plant with indigenous value now reduced to parasite status, On Vegetal Politics is a fascinating graphical study of nature, belonging and the agro-industrial matrix.

Lu Yang | DOKU Digital Alaya

Blending religion, philosophy, science, psychology and modern technology, Shanghai-based artist Lu Yang produces ‘fantastical, shocking and often painful’ images which allude to real life forms amid structures of natural or religious origin.

With an oeuvre spanning game engines, VR, 3D-animated films and more, Yang has collaborated with everybody from acclaimed scientists to pop stars and robotics companies.

Alexandra Daisy Ginsberg | The Wilding of Mars

Introducing a refreshing perspective on Mars as an open frontier primed for human occupation, Ginsberg’s artwork imagines the trajectory of a planetary wilderness growing across the terracotta surface. Free from exploitation, the simulation follows a flourishing Martian landscape where the human perspective is relegated to voyeuristic camera angles.