Creative TechnologyGame DesignArtSound DesignNew Media ArtTechnologyAlgorithmic Design
Isabelle Arvers & Ezéchiel Sene-Boileau
Biography
Isabelle Arvers is a French artist, machinima filmmaker, curator and researcher based in Marseille. For 25 years she has worked at the intersection of art and video games, with a focus on queer, feminist and decolonial practices from the Souths. She holds a PhD in Multimedia Art from the University of Lisbon (2024), with a thesis titled Decolonizing Art and Video Games. Her recent projects include Beyond Green Games, an eco-games and machinima co-creation with communities, and Aux Futurs Ancestraux, a film-game trilogy rooted in Vodún cosmology in Benin.
Ezéchiel Sene-Boileau is a composer, amateur pianist and digital designer. A graduate in digital design from the École Supérieure d’Art et Design de Saint-Étienne, he obtained his DNSEP there with honours from the jury. He is currently completing a double degree with the College of Design and Innovation at Tongji University in Shanghai, ranked as Asia’s leading design school. His work explores the intersection of music, neuroscience and game design. He studies how musical structures can be used to create a complete reward system, beyond simple audio feedback. He was selected to present this research at the Ludomusicology 2026 conference and created the Tension Engine, a video game music software based on the musical loop paradigm that produces precise, adaptive music that reacts to gameplay in real time, enabling the composition and generation of musical rewards.
Gallery
©Isabelle Arvers, ©Beyond Green Games Immersions, ©Atelier ElonM, ©Atelier ElonM Movie, ©Tension Engine, ©Copyright Ezechiel, ©Pierre Grasset
About the talk
Video Games in Dialogue With Ancestral Knowledge, From Ritual to Interactive Music
How can video games enter into dialogue with ancestral knowledge and oral tradition? This talk brings together Isabelle Arvers and Ezéchiel Sene-Boileau around that question, with a focus on sub-Saharan Africa and its diasporas.
In 2019, to celebrate two decades of curating art and video games, Isabelle Arvers embarked on the Art & Games World Tour: seventeen countries of the Souths, nearly 300 artists and game designers interviewed, six exhibitions curated. Her doctoral research, Decolonizing Art & Video Games, shows how independent creators use games to reclaim their own narratives, representations and cosmogonies, and to imagine counter-fictions from the margins. It resulted in a Cartography of Queer, Feminist and Decolonial Art and Games of some 150 works.
She then presents Aux Futurs Ancestraux (Towards Ancestral Futures), created in Benin with Vodún priests and guardians of knowledge, young artists and game developers: film-games and an immersive game built from rituals, chants and 3D scans of sacred places, where listening and slowness replace conquest.
The talk closes with Ezéchiel Sene-Boileau, a game audio designer. His research asks how music from various cultures can work as a reward in games. It guides players toward what has value, beyond points or currency. He introduces Tension Engine, an adaptive music system built from that research: the score reacts in real time to everything the player does. He reworked the recordings made in Benin into one of the Engine's musical rewards. Together, they show how a game, films, a soundscape and a documentary can speak to the same questions from different angles.
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