objkt Meets - Estelle Flores

The first video of the new interview series marks Estelle Flores’ debut on the platform objkt.one. The drop of Explaining-Showing-Doing happens this Friday, the 20th.

objkt Meets is an entirely new format for our team. We're now experimenting with interviews in video format on YouTube, partly because it was something we always had in mind, but also due to actual circumstances. Since the platform X stopped operating in Brazil, hosting Spaces with Brazilian artists has become impossible. So, why not make the best of the situation? Perfect timing.

In this exciting debut, Kika Nicolela, an artist and objkt’s curator, interviews Estelle Flores, a Brazilian artist specializing in game art, who is launching her first drop on objkt.one this Friday, the 20th, presenting the Explaining-Showing-Doing collection. “I’m very proud to have been invited to this curation. It was honestly a dream, a goal: it was on my list of things to achieve in this space,” Flores shares.

Explaining

Explaining-Showing-Doing - one of the pieces in the drop on objkt.one.

In the interview, Kika explores the processes behind this artist’s drop, a collection of eight machinimas —animations created using real-time computer graphics engines, often from video games — captured within The Sims 4 for Your Home, a large-scale, multichannel video installation on the Schlosser Media Wall, part of the exhibition Easel Engine, curated by Regina Harsanyi at the Museum of the Moving Image in New York City. ‘It was the coolest thing that’s ever happened to me as an artist, to this day,’ she says without hesitation, referring to her participation in Easel Engine.

Flores then processed the videos through Hydra, an application created by artist Olivia Jack. ‘Hydra is a kind of synthesizer that uses JavaScript to trigger plugins and process videos,’ she explains. She began learning to code through Hydra last year.

The artist also added excerpts from her research to the videos. ‘Last month, I saw a play that used the idea of composing texts from various excerpts of scientific works, theories, plays, and poems—and it all turned into poetry in the end. I thought it was magical and decided to do the same in this collection because I also have all these voices in my head right now, immersed in research and studies as I try to enter a master’s program,’ she explains.

In a collage exercise combining short poems with citations from Yunus Emre, Baudrillard, Freud, Schechner, and other thinkers from diverse fields, Estelle Flores aims to outline a way of perceiving the actions we perform while playing simulation games.

Showing

Dissimulate - Simulate: another piece by Estelle Flores in Explaining-Showing-Doing.

“In these machinimas, these videos, we see a different kind of virtual universe, one we're used to thinking of as the opposite of reality, but which is actually just an extension of it. We inhabit many virtual environments that don't feel so opposite to our reality, like chats, like this Google Meets space we're in now. So, I wanted to show that connection, bringing in other virtual spaces we regularly use to compare with the game.”

Doing

Painting inside The Sims has been a practice the artist has pursued since 2020, and she now has over 100 pieces. “It was the first collection I released in Web3, on the Tezos blockchain, through hic et nunc. I thought it was very ironic that being an artist in The Sims meant painting, and I wanted to make art with that. I found it to be a microcosm of how society views art and what’s hyper-valued in art. Later, through research, I realized that in the process of reducing reality to fit into a game and make it playable, we also reduce the subject. This ends up revealing social dynamics that are explained by subjectivists, but not by the game.”

Estelle Flores also shares and shows many of her other practices as an artist to Kika in the interview, including the zines she produced years ago and some of the physical artworks she has created. From her studio, we get to know more about the artist behind the work, making a deeper connection and seeing her face.

Speaking about the pieces in Explaining-Showing-Doing, she concludes, perhaps with the most precious of all practices: “I make them with a lot of love.”

No doubt about that.

To watch the full conversation between the curator and the artist in this first objkt Meets, visit objkt’s Youtube channel (coming soon).

Check out all the pieces of Explaining-Showing-Doing on the objkt.one gallery by this Friday 20th, 6PM C.E.T. (coming soon).