Ubisoft presents
Photomode : Out there in games
Ubisoft is celebrating art through “in-game” photography and is inviting players from around the world to let their inner artist express themselves by taking their most beautiful shots!
Photomode, which is available in many Ubisoft games, is a tool designed for gamers. It’s a way for them to take hold of these worlds, to visit them in different ways, to observe the smallest of details, and to reveal their subtleties.
THE CONTEST
The first edition of Ubisoft’s Photomode contest was held from September 10th to October 26th, 2022.
The contest was open to all and several thousands of participants from all over the world signed up.
20 winners were selected by a jury composed of 6 video game, photography, and virtual experience professionals.
Their works were exhibited in a New York gallery from November 17th to 20th, 2022 with the winners also receiving several prizes including MSI PCs and Ubisoft+ subscriptions. The top 3 were invited to the exhibition opening in New York.
Stay tuned for the second edition of the contest!
THE WINNERS 2022
2022'S EXHIBITION
By creating this exhibition, we wanted to celebrate the creativity of players around the world and to provide them the opportunity to share with us their vision, their sensibilities, and to accompany our reflections on the issues raised by in-game photography. But as more and more professional artists use this tool, we felt it was necessary to bring together these ideas from gamer-photographers with those of more seasoned artists.
This exhibition thus brings together the original work of 20 gamer-photographers, chosen by a jury of professionals following a competition open to all, and of four young artists - Mélanie Courtinat (Fr), Pascal Greco (Ch), Will Saunders (Us) et Ken Sheely (US) – who were given carte blanche.
What are these virtual universes, so realistic and yet so far beyond our reality? What is our relationship with them and what emotions do they evoke within us? These are the questions this exhibition tries to answer by offering you an intense and rich immersion into these other universes.
Curation: Mohamed Megdoul
Partners: Villa Albertine, Msi
Prints, framing and construction: C2 Imaging
Scenography: Victoire Guillaumet et Louis Bonichon
Production: Agence Mnstr
The Artists
Will
Saunders"…Like There is No Tomorrow"+Will Saunders (born in 1994) lives in California and works in the four corners of the world. Accustomed to shooting extreme sports, this was his induction into in-game photography, immersing himself in the universe of Far Cry 6. A game which tells the story of a guerilla-style resistance attempting to bring down the dictator of the fictional island of Yara.
From his voyage he brings back dozens of images that alternate between the daily lives of non-player characters, suspended in a routine of eternal conflict and terrible and strange scenes of war from the heart of the gameplay. Fluctuating between raw grittiness, absurdity and even humor, these images bear all the bizarre and uncanny realism of the video game.
Kent
Sheely"Phantom Arrays: The Eye Is Not a Camera"+Ken Sheely (born in 1984) is a veteran of in-game photography and a digital artist who places the video game at the center of his work. Technical experimentation, hacking, physical installations, since 2007 the artist has produced numerous works that explore the video game.
Using a technological approach, Kent Sheely has grasped the traditional codes of photography such as long exposure and superimposition to present us with a quasi-impressionist work which reveals the fleetingness and the endlessness, the pause and the movement of these intangible worlds. An initial proposition that focuses on movement and plays with the basic unit of any video oeuvre - the frame / second. And another, that examines the relationship between the video game and the various interfaces, which here become the only comprehensible patterns in the elusive “flow of images”.
Mélanie
Courtinat"A side-quest is not enough"+Mélanie Courtinat (born in 1993) lives and works in Paris. An immersive artist, she is particularly interested in the mechanisms of gameplay and the emotions they arouse, through the creation of 3D worlds and installations of virtual or augmented reality.
Traveling through the virtual London of Watch Dogs Legion, the artist was drawn to the virtual inhabitants that populate this world. And by placing one of them at the heart of the narrative, she questions the mechanisms of empathy and how these stem primarily from the stories we tell ourselves.
Pascal
Greco"Dilated Maps"+Pascal Greco (born in 1978) lives and works in Geneva, Switzerland. Director and photographer, he recently began doing in-game photography for his Place(s) project, centered around the scenery of Death Stranding from the Kojima Productions studio. Here, he extends his work in the game Assassin’s Creed Valhalla, Ghost Recon Wildlands and Far Cry 6.
Soothing, contemplative, mineral, Pascal’s work focuses on revealing the importance of the scenic backgrounds. These gaming lands, the environments where the characters’ actions take place, here become powerful protagonists. Whether in magnificent wide shots, or close-ups of almost organic matter, these photographs allow us to contemplate simulations of the effects of matter, light and textures that often surpass what reality has to offer us.
