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Artist Talk & Happy Hour: Mélanie Courtinat

Gray Area welcomes French XR visionary Mélanie Courtinat on the occasion of her solo show, 'The Siren'

Artist Talk & Happy Hour: Mélanie Courtinat

Tuesday, March 18, 2025

Doors 6, talk + guided playthrough 6:30, happy hour pricing on the bar till 8

All Ages

Standing performance, accommodations made at request

View our FAQ page for more info, or contact us at info@grayarea.org with any accommodation requests.

About the Event

Join us on the evening of March 18th at Gray Area as we welcome Mélanie Courtinat, whose interactive game work The Siren is currently on view in the Gray Area Gallery. Turning preconceived notions of video games on their head, Courtinat's work questions the player's role in virtual environments—often involving high fidelity graphics rendered by simulation engines. Courtinat will give a short overview of her work, followed by a guided playthrough of The Siren and a Q&A with the audience moderated by associate curator Wade Wallerstein.

WORKSHOP

How to Build a Sustainable Economic Model in Contemporary Digital Art
Sunday, March 17 | 6 PM – 7:30 PM

In a rapidly evolving digital art landscape, balancing creative ambition with financial sustainability is a crucial challenge. Led by award-winning artist and art director Mélanie Courtinat, this workshop explores strategies for building viable economic models as a digital artist, covering topics such as funding opportunities, collaborations, pricing strategies, and alternative revenue streams.

About The Siren

The Siren (2024) is an interactive experience built with Unreal Engine that questions the traditional conventions of video games. In the game, players embody a heroine wearing a shining suit of armor who wanders aimlessly along a beach at dusk. Once in control, players explore this beautiful and austere world under the watchful eye of an omniscient narrator. The narrator prompts players to undertake the seemingly arbitrary task—or side quest—of collecting bioluminescent seashells scattered across the sand. Only by collecting all of the shells can the player advance to the main quest: rescuing a damsel in distress. Though rendered in ultra-high definition fidelity, resembling the hyperrealistic outputs of mass market AAA game studio productions, The Siren’s unique mechanics make it a distinctly different experience. The work elides a blockbuster main storyline and instead hones in on the droll imperatives and mundane taskings present in most video games. In this way, The Siren probes the meanings we assign to actions within gamespace, our relationships to the worlds we inhabit, and the motivations behind our playful engagements. This experience is designed to be accessible to all visitors, including gaming newcomers, while also providing an additional meta-level of understanding for seasoned players.

The Siren is presented in San Francisco with support from Villa Albertine, in partnership with the Albertine Foundation, the Institut Français, and the French Ministry of Europe and Foreign Affairs. Gray Area is proud to be a 2025 French Immersion Laureate institution. The Siren was originally commissioned by the Pully Art Museum as part of their exhibition "Vivre l’œuvre / Voyage aux frontières de l’art immersif contemporain".

About the Artist

Mélanie Courtinat

Mélanie Courtinat (1993) is an award-winning artist and art director based in Paris.

Considering video games as a major medium, she focuses on their extraordinary immersive properties and seeks to push their boundaries.

Her work, crafted through the use of digital tools, encompasses CGI images and films, interactive experiences, as well as virtual and augmented reality projects.

As an artist, her personal creations are consistently showcased worldwide in cultural institutions, galleries, and museums, from Tokyo to New York.

As an art director, she collaborates on commissioned projects for clients in the luxury, fashion, culture, and music industries.

Mélanie also teaches video game history at ÉCAL in Lausanne and virtual reality at Beaux-Arts de Paris, while regularly conducting lectures and workshops in academic settings.

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