Meet Mario Mu
Mario Mu is a visual artist, director, and absolute wonderful human living in Berlin, Germany. Mario and I met many years ago when he was studying under Hito Steyerl and very immersed in the world of live-action roleplay (LARPing). Since that time, he’s become immersed in the world of digital environments and filmmaking.
The following is a interview in the lead-up to his online course, World in Collision, which asks: How can we inspire innovative strategies for collective coexistence and resistance with the language of game-based cinema? The course begins 24. April.
How did your practice come to be? Did you know before starting your education this was the direction your work was going?
As a child I used to draw constantly, that was pretty much the only thing I was doing, mostly borrowing influences from comic books, and later I learned the basics of traditional animation. After highschool I went to study painting at the Academy of Fine Arts in Zagreb and eventually got obsessed with experimental film. I remember watching the works of Derek Jarman, Pipilloti Rist and Mathew Barney with my professor Leonida Kovac, absolutely marvelous. However, it was more about music videos from artists like Arca or FKA Twigs, where I could feel certain worlds were opening, a space where I felt it was important to embrace my own experience. There was finally something really exciting happening. The portal was open.
Around that time, a post-conceptual doctrine in fine arts was still pretty mandatory and the works presented in galleries mostly reminded me of luxury furniture wrapped in dry intellectual wit. There was also a generation before us who got branded with another shady term, which was post-internet art, but I think that fell apart quickly. Meanwhile, I was doing a lot of odd jobs to survive, and finally started to work in gaming and publishing. I moved to Berlin in 2015., where I did my master degree in experimental film with prof. Hito Steyerl, focusing my practice on the tensions between cinema and gaming. I still have daily drawing routines in the form of a sequence of images which helps me to draft out whatever ideas I am having at the moment.
Can you talk about experiences growing up in Croatia and how that informed your work?
I actually grew up on the border between Bosnia and Croatia, in a small town called Neum on the Adriatic Coast, and back then it was still one country, Yugoslavia. I remember we were watching lots of television and in the early nineties most shows were saturated with nationalist propaganda, the country was falling apart, and segregation was designed on the ideas of independent nations. Also most cartoons were quite weird, but in a good way, very creative and remarkable. They were coming from The Zagreb School of Animation which has probably had the most influence on me from an early age, with their attention to the transitional space and morphing images, blending over time with my interest in Japanese anime and video games. Kids were also playing outside a lot, hide and seek was without doubt the most popular pastime.
One of the earliest memories I have is my Mom explaining that Dad is going to fight in war. I also wanted to go to the battlefield, so I hid in his military bag, which had been stored by the table that morning. The idea was to smuggle myself to the front line, where I thought the most interesting and coolest things were happening, as seen on television. Eventually he found me hiding inside, my plans failed, and so together with my mom and sister, and some other relatives, we had to take refuge on an island not far away from our coastline.
Everyday I would draw on paper my father and his hero friends shooting at enemy forces or green planes shelling our houses. Bomb fragments were called shrapnel. Sometimes, a soldier who would come for a coffee at our place would give me shrapnel as a gift. All the children collected shrapnels. When we came back home, our little town was almost completely destroyed. My grandfather was particularly creative with military waste. He made a jar out of a large bomb shell in which they planted strawberries. Of all the military oddities, I remember the little bags of peanut butter that some foreign soldiers gave us. It was the best thing I've ever tasted.
What continues to inspire you about game-based filmmaking? How is it different than any other medium for storytelling?
Game-based filmmaking is just about now leaving its infant phase, and there are obviously some basic video-game tropes that we need to leave behind, as well as learn how to emancipate from traditional filmmaking. You don’t need a camera standing between you and your imagination. The narrative setting does not depend on the recorded material any more, so the visible reality does not have to be a point of reference.
What I find fascinating is how we can explore different ways of dwelling in a world where digital environments are built in a similar manner to how images are made. The reality we see is not recorded, it is completely constructed. While machine intelligence produces architectural solutions and informs our daily movements with data-driven predictions, the operational level of abstraction is getting quite hard for any individual to deal with on their own. Learning about world building while using digital tools to create environments will be one of the crucial skills if we want to deal directly with the many issues that are already coming our way.
How does your first game-based film differ from your latest one?
In the beginning I was mostly ignorant about traditional filmmaking and I was pretty much in a complete denial regarding my painting background. Now I am learning to understand how important that experience was for me. Also, I take care to experience a necessary time for things to develop, in the similar way the weather is changing, or a fruit ripening. Everything else is a tool, our clothes, our kitchen, our body, our language. Time is our main medium. Sometimes the tools don’t even exist until they break, it’s the moment of recognition, manifesting how dependent we are on technology in some cases.
I grew up in a working class environment where people tend to make things with their own hands and spend time with the world in a way where things happen over longer periods. I think that’s very important, to change over time, and let things happen as we go. In that sense my work is now less conceptual, and I am more sensitive about how I can follow a certain sound, not knowing where it will take me.
Generally speaking, my filmmaking practice is related to image-based cinema more than games. I use video game engines to create images, and then the narrative unfolds, emerging from this pictorial space.
What topics are you most excited to share with the participants of your class?
We will approach the art of crafting films, animations, and moving images using game engines. I believe it will be very helpful to learn about efficient ways to avoid spending excessive time on intricate details, so that everyone can find a simple and effective method that suits them. I am very excited to see how participants will react to real-time filmmaking and how they will respond to this notion of immediacy. I am also very interested in different concerns, topics, feelings and any other personal curiosities that participants will be bringing to this class. We will have to find a way to make all these worlds overlap, and in the process we will see a new world emerging from our different human and spatial perspectives.
How to provide a setting, like when you are building a stage, for the others to perform their own narratives, or express themselves, especially people who usually would not have had such an opportunity? In this class we will learn how to build such environments, and talk about ways we can perform, organize, share knowledge and make work together. We will have to discuss technological determinism, notably why are people afraid of machine intelligence or virtual reality? I am eager to hear about new and bold ideas, maybe less dystopian, less cyberpunk, and see about other ways besides techno-occultism, mysticism, transcendentalism and that sort of stuff. In the future there will be many new platforms emerging for innovative ways of social organizing and acting. Our environment is changing rapidly, and our sense of space is changing as well, so we will have to deal with this as soon as possible.
Thank you, Mario! <3
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To learn more about Mario’s work, find him on instagram here.
For more information and to sign-up for World in Collision, his 5-week online class, which begins 24. April at School of Machines in Berlin, click here.