EXTRA Residency Talk Brings Off-Market Game Art to Arles
Alix Bugat and Elouan Le Bars close the Brussels-Arles residency for experimental video games with a free talk at Octobre Numérique.
- When
- Fri., Oct. 23, 2026, 4 p.m.
- Where
- Auditorium d'Arles Créative, Arles, France
- Cost
- Free, no booking
Elouan Le Bars and Alix Bugat close their month in EXTRA, a residency for experimental video games, with a free public talk at Octobre Numérique in Arles on Friday afternoon. The festival's announcement describes the residency as support for singular work made outside the market.
Teaser for Elouan Le Bars's VRAL #113 program, Milan Machinima Festival's online series, August 2025. Watch it on Vimeo.
Le Bars trained as an engineer before art school at ENSAPC in Cergy, and the engineering shows. The work bends the mechanics of games, crisis and management until their assumptions are visible, moving between video, installation and game design. A 2025 solo show at Frac Île-de-France's Le Plateau, Deux vérités, un mensonge, built rooms out of offices, museums and rage rooms. The festival's page for the talk shows Side Quest (2026), a screen piece installed on a low bench.
EXTRA was started in 2024 by Octobre Numérique with the French embassy in Belgium and games.brussels, with funding from the Institut français. Each year an independent jury picks one Belgian and one French artist for two weeks in Brussels and two in Arles. Both are paid, and neither owes a finished work, a workshop or anything else in return. The 2025 residents were Mathilde Reynaud and Sohel Bourgeau; Reynaud's bug-themed game installation Le langage des phalènes is in this year's festival.
Bugat, based in Brussels and a 2023 graduate of the Beaux-Arts de Nantes, works between sculpture, installation and digital environments. Bugat grinds urban debris and recombines it with 3D-printed and modeled parts into objects that read as relics, prostheses and leftovers from a ruined world, arranged as game-like spaces the visitor has to enter bodily. Octobre Numérique runs through Nov. 8. Killscreen covered the festival's Anima Ludens show earlier this month.
Alix Bugat, Quantum Computer (2021), and a frame from the VRAL #113 teaser. Images: Octobre Numérique; Milan Machinima Festival.
Residencies like EXTRA rarely make the games press. Killscreen's free Radar newsletter tracks the artists working at the edges of the form, three times a week.
