*****************
September 15, 2003
*****************

Cinematexas "Games Without Borders" Festival September 19-21

The Cinematexas International Short Film Festival will present an inaugural event devoted to computer and video games this September 19-21 on the campus of the University of Texas at Austin. The GAMES WITHOUT BORDERS festival continues Cinematexas' commitment to bringing the bleeding edge in visual entertainment to the world of cinema.

The GAMES WITHOUT BORDERS mini-festival will present the world of digital gaming and will emphasize the ways in which the technologies inherent in this medium have allowed independent practitioners to create their own forms of artistry. Whether in screenings of machinima (mini-movies created using 3-D game engines), demos of independent- and student-built mods (games built by rearranging and remixing existing games), or performance and installation art created from the guts of classic game hardware, GAMES WITHOUT BORDERS will present a range of digital presentations that promise to stretch the definition of "film festival" to its outermost boundaries.

Now in its eighth year, Cinematexas is America's premier showcase for radical explorations in cinema, sound and moving image arts. Hailed as "one of the most inspiring and significant festivals in the United States" (IndieWIRE), Cinematexas will once again light up the American Southwest with its vanguard programming and mixture of traditional and cutting-edge cinema.

A keynote address from legendary author and cyberculture critic Mark Dery will kick off GAMES WITHOUT BORDERS. Dery's lecture will explore the meaning of digital games and gaming in today's society and will illuminate why the medium has attracted more than its share of independent producers and practitioners. Dery will deliver his lecture on Friday, September 19, at 7:00 p.m., in the Avaya Auditorium (room 2.302) in the ACES building (at the corner of 24th and Speedway Streets) on the campus of the University of Texas at Austin.

Dery's presentation will be followed by demo presentations of three of the best indie- and student-produced games that Austin has to offer. Zed Quest (a student produced mod created for a game design course at the University of Texas), Texanus Circus Maximus (Ryan Molloy's biting satire of university life), and Tombfall (a remix of the classic Atari 2600 game Pitfall) will be presented Friday, September 19 starting at 8:45 p.m. in the Avaya Auditorium.

Saturday, September 20 brings the machinima section of the program (along with a party). At 3:00 p.m., in the Avaya Auditorium, designer and theorist Dr. Katie Salen will present her take on why machinima offers such a complex (and obsessive) form of download-based entertainment. Following Salen's presentation, the team behind Red vs. Blue will screen episodes from their phenomenally popular (and hilarious) Web-based machinima series, "The Blood Gulch Chronicles".

Also on Saturday, September 20, at 7:00 p.m., the Digital Media Collaboratory (a recently-formed research arm of the University of Texas' IC2 Institute) will open its freshly built—and well appointed—digital game research laboratory to festival attendees for a reception. Eat, drink, mingle, play the games. The reception will be held at the IC2 building, 2815 San Gabriel St. (four blocks west of Guadalupe St. and south of 29th St., near the University of Texas campus).

On Sunday, September 21, GAMES WITHOUT BORDERS returns to the ACES building to present a full day of lecture, performance, music, and installation art with digital games at the center of focus. Village Voice critic and New York Underground Film Festival Director Ed Halter will present his lecture "War Games: Digital Gaming and the U.S. Military" in the Avaya Auditorium at 3:00 p.m. At 5:30 p.m., military computer programmer Paul Slocum will explain and demonstrate how to create a pop music band using only an Atari 2600 game console, a Commodore 64, a luggable 286 PC, and a dot matrix printer as instruments. At 7:00 p.m., Digital mad scientist Cory Arcangel will explain how Commodore 64 cracking, psych abstraction, pixel graphics, and machinima all communicate concepts on how gaming technologies can be used to create far more than "just" games. Finally, the digital works of writer and music industry VIP Seth Price will be on display between 1:00 and 9:00 p.m. (ongoing), in the ACES Seminar Room (2.402).

Next year, GAMES WITHOUT BORDERS will initiate an international independent and student games competition. GAMES WITHOUT BORDERS is made possible by sponsorships from The University of Texas at Austin's College of Communication and the Digital Media Collaboratory.

All GAMES WITHOUT BORDERS events are free and open to the public. For more information about GAMES WITHOUT BORDERS, please contact Erich Pelletier, Director—Games Without Borders at 512-947-3459 or pelletier@mail.utexas.edu. You may also visit the Cinematexas website at www.cinematexas.org.