At the end of yesterday's post we wondered if, one day in a not so distant future, there may be exhibitions accompanied by intriguing gaming experiences. We may not be able to provide an answer to that question, but, in the meantime, we can enjoy events that combine art with video games.
"Worldbuilding: Gaming and Art in the Digital Age" is currently on at the Julia Stoschek Collection in Düsseldorf, Germany. One of the world's most comprehensive private collections, boasting over 870 artworks by 290 artists from around the world and with a focus on moving-image experiments from the 1960s and '70s, the Düsseldorf-based institution is celebrating its fifteenth anniversary, so the event is a way to mark this special birthday together with its visitors.
Curated by Hans Ulrich Obrist, "Worldbuilding" explores the relationship between gaming and time-based media art and the way creative minds interact with video games, turning them into an art form. The inspiration behind the event was a reflection on the power of gaming and on the number of gamers out there.
In a press release Obrist states: "In 2021 2.8 billion people - almost a third of the world’s population - played video games, making a niche pastime into the biggest mass phenomenon of our time. Many people spend hours every day in a parallel world and live a multitude of different lives. Video games are to the twenty-first century what movies were to the twentieth century and novels to the nineteenth century."
Artists started integrating the aesthetics of games decades ago, playing with the possibilities offered by the visual language of video games to explore our existence in virtual worlds.
But, as the years passed, other artists explored the theme of games from different perspectives, for example to offer a critique of the industry, including the discriminatory and stereotypical aspects of commercial and gaming logics. More recently, artists looked at gaming as a communicative tool that can develop new forms of engagement.
The installations and works included in "Worldbuilding" go from the mid-1990s to the present and include single-channel video works to site-specific, immersive, and interactive environments (some of them adapted for this event, others newly commissioned).
The result is a presentation with a plurality of voices as video game experiences can be wide and present utopias and dystopias, imagined and real worlds.
The show opens with pioneering artists who modified existing video and computer games for their own works since the 1990s.
Sturtevant, for example, reimagines Pac-Man; Peggy Ahwesh uses Lara Croft to tackle profound themes such as death and rebirth; while artist duo JODI (among the first artists to investigate and subvert conventions of the Internet, computer programs, and video and computer games) offer visitors the chance to play an anxiety-inducing hacked version of one of the "Quake" games.
Suzanne Treister, exploring the relationship between emerging technologies, society, alternative belief systems, and the potential futures of humanity, and Rebecca Allen, who has a special bond with the city of Düsseldorf due to her collaboration with the band Kraftwerk (and who also collaborated with Nam June Paik), are also celebrated.
Large-scale, game-based installations immerse the visitors in the work of a younger generation of artists such as Keiken, LuYang, Lawrence Lek, Gabriel Massan, and the Institute of Queer Ecology, the latter offering a trip to an island in "H.O.R.I.Z.O.N." (2021), a space where identity gets lost in a utopian vision of the world.
Danielle Brathwaite-Shirley's game, "She Keeps Me Damn Alive" (2021), employs the format of 1990s first person shooters to invite visitors to protect Black trans people from a variety of enemies using a handheld 3D printed gun.
Other artists included look at the interaction where the boundaries between artwork and social dimension of video games or the metaverse merge, as in the work of Lual Mayen, Cao Fei, Frances Stark, Angela Washko, and LaTurbo Avedon, who is both an avatar and an anonymous artist.
The digital game/mobile app "Salaam" (2016 - ongoing) by Lual Mayen, an autodidactic videogame developer and founder of Junub Games, recreates his own story.
Mayen moved with his parents from South Sudan to Northern Uganda to find a place of refuge and, in his videogame, players must flee a war zone. There's a connection with the real world in the game as, when you buy food or water in the game via in-app purchases, you actually send money directly to NGOs working in refugee camps.
Aesthetic components that come directly from the world of game programming, including 3D and VR, find a special place in the artworks of Ian Cheng (with the installation "BOB (Bag of Beliefs)" that was on display at the Venice Biennale in 2019), Ed Atkins, Meriem Bennani, Ed Fornieles, Rindon Johnson, and Jakob Kudsk Steensen.
Ed Fornieles uses the gaming structure for his immersive installations and web-based projects to explore the hyperactive and dystopian vision of the social media and how these permeate the dramas and objects of everyday life. In his "Bathing, Climbing, Falling, Sitting, Sleeping, and Swimming" (2015), the avatar of the artist, a fox, faces a wide variety of challenges including climbing data mountains.
Video works with a distinctly more narrative emphasis by Harun Farocki, Larry Achiampong & David Blandy, and Sondra Perry offer instead insight into other aspects of the games industry. Projects such as Farocki's "Serious Games", document the dichotomy between war and games through young soldiers practising military operations via game simulators.
There is more to discover in the "Jirry Tribe Stop" (2021) by Basmah Felemban who focuses in her practice on Islamic manuscripts between the 12th and 14th century revolving around cosmographies, mythical creatures, and cartography. In Felemban's work, worldbuilding turns into a method to understand her lost family history, the role of imagination in rewriting it, and the ways humans have resorted to bridging the gaps in the collective memory. Felemban developed the shapes, colours, and images featured in her work over two years, and collaborated with a team of 3D artists and game designers to create it.
Theo Triantafyllidis creates complex worlds and systems combining simulation, gaming, and NFT aesthetics, merging the virtual and the physical in uncanny ways.
His "Pastoral" (2019), a three-dimensional work for VR and installation, allows players to explore an expansive virtual hayfield in a video game-like environment and control a central character, an Orc wearing a bikini.
There are artists, such as KAWS, producing works that defy labels and cross disciplines' boundaries, including street art, graphic and product design. The exhibition includes a documentation of the artist's project entitled "NEW FICTION" (2022), developed earlier on this year in collaboration with Acute Art, online video game Fortnite, and London's Serpentine Galleries.
The project offered a bridge between the virtual and the physical worlds. All the paintings and sculptures in the exhibition as well as a miniature version of the entire show existed as AR works on the Acute Art app and could be viewed at home by viewers globally. A virtual recreation of the show was also available in Fortnite, allowing millions of players from all over the world to experience the exhibition from anywhere.
Most of the works included in "Worldbuilding" - among them videos, virtual reality (VR), artificial intelligence (AI), and game-based works - are interactive and this is an important aspect. With the Covid-19 pandemic, we forgot indeed how important it is to play with the environments artists provide us with and in this way visitors can immerse themselves in the multitude of alternative realities created by the artists involved in the event.
While perhaps it is premature to guess how games, AI, VR, and digital landscapes will inform the physicality of galleries and museum spaces in the future, "Worldbuilding" offers a glimpse into the future and proves that video games are the perfect vehicle to deliver artistic messaging and ideas.
"Worldbuilding" will travel to the Centre Pompidou-Metz from June 2023 to January 2024.
Image credits for this post
1. LuYang, The Great Adventure of Material World, 2019, video game and 3-channel video installation, 26′22″, color, sound. Installation view, WORLDBUILDING, JSC Düsseldorf. Photo: Alwin Lay.
2. Sturtevant, Pacman, 2012, HD video, 1′15″, color, sound. Video still. © Estate Sturtevant, Paris. Courtesy Galerie Thaddaeus Ropac, London/Paris/Salzburg/Seoul.
3. Peggy Ahwesh, She Puppet, 2001, video, 15′, color, sound. Video still. Courtesy of the artist and Electronic Arts Intermix (EAI), New York.
4. JODI, Untitled Game. Modifications of Video Game (Quake 1), 1998–2001, video game, unitled-game.org, infinite duration, color, sound. Courtesy of the artists.
5. Rebecca Allen, The Bush Soul #3, 1999, interactive software installation, infinite duration, color, sound. Courtesy of the artist and ZELDA.
6. Suzanne Treister, No Other Symptoms—Time Travelling with Rosalind Brodsky, 1995–1999, -ROM computer game, infinite duration, color, sound. Courtesy of the artist, Annely Juda Dine Art, London, and P.P.O.W. Gallery, New York.
7. LuYang, The Great Adventure of Material World, 2019, video game and 3-channel video installation, 26’22“, color, sound. Courtesy of the artist and Société, Berlin.
8. The Institute of Queer Ecology, H.O.R.I.Z.O.N. (Habitat One: Regenerative Interactive Zone of Nurture), 2021, videogame, infiniteduration, color, sound. Courtesy of the artists. Concept & Production: Nicolas Baird, Raphaëlle Cormier, Ceci Moss, Lee Pivnik, Jake Sillen; 3D Modelling & Sound Design: Valerie Caputo; Soundtrack: Mechatok. Commissioned by the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York, as a form of public programming for Countryside, The Future.
9. Danielle Brathwaite-Shirley, SHE KEEPS ME DAMN ALIVE, 2021, Unity-Game installation, infinite duration, color, sound. Installation view, WORLDBUILDING, JSC Düsseldorf. Photo: Alwin Lay.
10. LaTurbo Avedon, Permanent Sunset, 2020–ongoing, video, 6′13″, color, sound. Video still. Courtesy of the artist.
11. Ed Fornieles, Falling, 2015, HD video, 3’03“, color, sound. Courtesy of the artist and Cabinet, London.
12. Harun Farocki, Serious Games I: Watson is Down, 2009–2010, video, 8′, color, sound. Courtesy of Harun Farocki Filmproduction, 2022.
13. Basmah Felemban, The Jirry Tribe Stop, 2021, video game, infinite duration, color, sound. Installation view, WORLDBUILDING, JSC Düsseldorf. Photo: Alwin Lay.
14. Theo Triantafyllidis, Pastoral, 2019, video game, infinite duration, color, sound. Installation view, WORLDBUILDING, JSC Düsseldorf. Photo: Alwin Lay.
15. LuYang, The Great Adventure of Material World, 2019, video game and 3-channel video installation, 26′22″, color, sound. Installation view, WORLDBUILDING, JSC Düsseldorf. Photo: Alwin Lay.
16. Ian Cheng, BOB (Bag of Beliefs), 2018–2019, artificial lifeform, infinite duration, color, sound, dimensions variable. Installation view, WORLDBUILDING, JSC Düsseldorf. Photo: Alwin Lay.
17. Transmoderna, Terraforming CIR, 2022, virtual reality installation, 8′, color, sound. Courtesy of Transmoderna. In collaboration with Sofia Crespo, Feileacan McCormick, Moisés Horta, Alan Ixba, and Gabriel Massan.
18. Frances Stark, My Best Thing, 2011, video, 99′17″, color, sound. Installation view, WORLDBUILDING, JSC Düsseldorf. Courtesy of the artist and Gladstone Gallery, Brussels/New York. Photo: Alwin Lay.
Comments