#vector2013

Well friends, Vector 2013 is done, and we've finally begun editing and posting our documentation today.

We begin with our photographic documentation for the entire festival, which you can find on our new flickr page.

Also, after much discussion, Team Vector has decided to leave this tumblr site up as a document of how Vector first came together and as an archive site for the first edition of the festival.

We've relocated our activities to a new Team Vector Blog, which will now house our updates, calls, news, documentation and more.  So give us a follow or pop by now and again to see what the members of Team Vector are up to.

Vector 2013 was the end of a long road for us, but we have also agreed that it was just the beginning of a longer journey together.  In the fall we will be launching the first edition of the Vector Annual, a digital and / or print journal and catalogue documenting Vector 2013's proceedings, as well as housing critical writing on intersections between game and art cultures.

Vector begins tomorrow with our special screening Co-Presented by VideoFag.  A Stranger Comes to Town: The avatar and identity, begins at 7pm at Propeller, at 984 Queen St. West.  Tickets for the screening are $5 and can be purchased on our eventbright, or at the door.

Propeller is also home to the net.works exhibition (which we finished installing tonight, pictured above), a survey exhibition of a wide range of creative practices centered around games.  In addition to screenings and exhibitions, Propeller also plays host to the pop up shop, which will now be selling Local No 12's great card game about video games; Metagame

We believe that metagame is the perfect game to be promoting at the festival as it is designed as a means of creating a critical dialogue about games between game players.

** Also we were just featured on Akimbo.ca, an arts, culture and technology site in Canada.  You can read it here!

With a little over 24 hours until our first event, Vector has already been receiving some attention from media outlets.

Creative Applications.net posted this Interview with Vector Co-Director Skot Deeming yesterday on the origins of the festival, the state of the 'new arcade' and issues of representation in gaming.

And Toronto Magazine Broken Pencil posted this interview this morning.  Talking about the state of the medium as an artform and how we might interpret that.

And If you're coming to Vector this weekend, and want to tweet about it. Please tag us (@vectorgameart) in your tweets. or use the hashtag #vector2013.

We want to hear from you, and if you have questions, we'll respond right away! 

With four days left until Vector 2013 gets underway, we're hauling equipment, installing work, and otherwise running around the city getting everything in place.

Today we received an update on one of the performances happening at our Playing Personae: Embodied and Engendered Performances event, which is on Friday February 22nd at 10pm.

Daniele Hopkins and Kyle Duffield will be performing Itagaki Interface, a work in which the artists use their own bodies to challenge exaggerated representations of the human body in the fighting game Dead or Alive, by Tomonobu Itakagi. The game features hyper feminized and hyper masculinized bodies in one on one combat.

In the performance, the artists wear modified game controllers on their chests, essentially acting as human game controllers.  The audience is confronted with the challenge of having to play one another in the game, by manipulating the controllers worn by the artists.  This piece is a hybridization of 70s body-centric performance art and new media interactive performance, challenging us all to consider the ways in which our bodies are represented in interactive media. Daniele and Kyle have been posting process pictures on their blog recently, but today they posted a final photo of the working prototype of the controller bra.

Team Vector is very excited for what will prove to be a challenging and confrontational performance. Join us for Playing Personae on Friday February 22nd, where artist Angela Washko will also be performing her work "Chastity and The Council on Gender Sensitivity and Behavioral Awareness in World of Warcraft".