GAIA 2024 Online Edition was a unique and exciting event that emerged in response to the remarkable growth of the GAIA community. While originally occurring in-person every other year, it’s become clear that we need a space to stay connected, share ideas, and engage in the discussions that inspire us. This special two-day event allowed us to come together virtually, with 33 speakers from 19 countries participating across 10 sessions, creating a rich and diverse program.
The online version is not merely a warm up to the in-person edition (which will take place in September 2025 in Barcelona) but a highly-accessible version of GAIA, for anyone around the globe who might not be able to attend the in-person meetups, and a way to gather larger parts of our growing community.
We are now working on a program to share knowledge between game arts organizers and curators and would love to have your input. If you feel like being an active part of these online sessions this is your opportunity to propose a talk or activity! You can fill in now the Open Call Form. For inspiration check out the programming at our previous online edition.
We welcome established as well as emergent game culture producers, curators, community organizers, art curators and museum professionals, streamers, critics, academics and all professionals who are working, or intend to work, with videogames as cultural objects.
This year GAIA is being produced by Luján Oulton (Now Play This), Jim Munroe and Marie LeBlanc Flanagan (Game Arts International Network), and Shalev Moran. Visit our newly updated GAIA website for more info.
From special guest editor, María Luján Oulton… We are bringing back to life GAIN’s annual roundup newsletter, an inspirational collection of game arts related photos from events around the globe.
For the first time since 2019 we reached out to friends, colleagues and like-minded groups asking to share their favorite pictures from the videogame arts event or project they worked on in 2023. The result is events from 23 cities covering five continents. The game arts community is coming back in a big way!
If you like it, please spread the link (or retweet) and let us know about any events or people that have not been named here so we can include them in future roundups.
The first ever Toronto Games Week had an incredible response, with over a thousand attendees over the 15 events! It kicked off with a Dirty Rectangles social in the sci-fi punk rock bar, See-scape.
photo by Jooyoung Oh
Most of the events were free to the public and three were outdoors, like this pop-up arcade in Trinity Bellwoods Park after dark.
The third Game Arts International Assembly will be happening June 5-7th, 2023 in Toronto, Canada. With a participant cap of 20, GAIA is an intimate symposium for game art curators and game community organizers to level up their professional development and connect with their international peers. In addition to on site talks sharing personal experiences, playful workshops, and practical sessions, GAIA will include field trips to different locations in the city.
Game Arts Curators Kit is a new seventy page handbook for anyone interested in bringing a curatorial eye to the presentation of videogames. Over 25 writers and editors have generously shared their field-tested experiences of exhibiting games, spanning the practical to the political, the ethical to the esthetic.
Beginning as an idea in a session led by María Luján Oulton and Chad Toprak at GAIA 2019, Chaz Evans and Rene G. Cepeda took up the massive task of coordinating the writing of over 25,000 words on our nascent art practice during GAIA 2021.
We are more than half way through the Game Arts International Assembly 2021 at this point and we thought we’d give a bit of a summary of some of the highlights thus far. We chose to have Mer Grazzini doodle document the sessions to give people sense of what they were like! Here’s The New Spacemakers session:
We have already received a number of exciting proposals for Game Arts International Assembly sessions and have started working with people to flesh them out. However, there’s still a few more days for you to submit any ideas you might have via our not-very-taxing form. For further inspiration check out our programming from our first edition. Selected sessions will receive an honorarium.
