Theo Triantafyllidis
Worldbuilding Gaming and Art in the Digital Age
June 10, 2023–January 15, 2024Centre Pompidou-Metz
WORLDBUILDING: GAMING AND ART IN THE DIGITAL AGE
Curator: Hans-Ulrich Obrist, Artistic Director of the Serpentine Galleries
Worldbuilding: Gaming and Art in the Digital Age will explore the different
ways in which contemporary artists have engaged with video games and made
them into a new art form. Curated by Hans-Ulrich Obrist, Artistic Director of the
Serpentine Galleries, this exhibition will take place on the third floor of the Centre
Pompidou-Metz, a gallery space conceived by architect Shigeru Ban. Transforming
this already extraordinary floor into one big lively arcade, the show will invite
visitors to participate in a variety of experiences. They can play video games while
lounging on comfortable couches and easy chairs, wander through multisensory
immersive environments, watch a program of short videos in a screening room,
and encounter virtual characters like a non-binary orc, a sentient serpentine AI,
an extinct Hawaiian songbird, and affectionate trash-absorbing sea creatures.
Certainly, this exhibit focuses on an activity worth reckoning with. In 2022, 3.03 billion
people—more than a third of the world’s population—played video games. As HansUlrich Obrist asserts, this hobby has become “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”. Around a hundred years ago,
in his book Homo Ludens, the historian Johan Huizinga theorized that play is a basic
drive of humankind. Bringing people together in new ways, he contends, play is the
source of culture.
More recently, in his book Games: Agency as Art, C. Thi Nguyen argues that games,
particularly video games, are a distinct type of art which “let us experience forms of
agency we might not have discovered on our own”. As such, gaming has the potential
to unleash powerful psychic forces. Video games have proven to be an effective tool
for the development of training and strategy. Indeed, scientists have made good use
of video games simulating biological systems to speculate on the possible origins and
destination of life. Accordingly, video games as a digital art form offer a means for an
existential quest beyond the embodied physical world and into the multiverse. By their
very nature, they open the potential to imagine and build new worlds.
Worldbuilding will include 3D animated videos, virtual reality experiences, interactive
video game based installations, and videos by artists from around the world: Koo Jeong
A, Peggy Ahwesh, Rebecca Allen, Cory Arcangel, Ed Atkins, LaTurbo Avedon, Neil
Beloufa, Meriem Bennani, David Blandy & Larry Achiampong, Danielle BrathwaiteShirley, Ian Cheng, Sara Dibiza, Mimosa Echard, Harun Farocki, Cao Fei, Ed
Fornieles, Sarah Friend, Dominique Gonzalez-Foerster, Kim Heecheon, Jonathan
Horowitz, Pierre Huyghe, Institute of Queer Ecology, JODI, Rindon Johnson, Kaws,
Keiken, Lawrence Lek, LuYang, Gabriel Massan, Lual Mayen, M/M (Paris), Philippe
Parreno, Sondra Perry, Caroline Poggi & Jonathan Vinel, Sara Sadik, Jacolby
Satterwhite, Jakob Kudsk Steensen, Sturtevant, Transmoderna, Suzanne Treister,
Theo Triantafyllidis, and Angela Washko.
Several of the artists in the exhibit began making work that refers to video games as
early as the 1980’s while most of the others were just born around that time. For the
works in this show, artists have addressed video games in various ways. Some have
adapted their themes and visual style to make videos. Others have modified, hacked,
and subverted existing video games. Finally, some have created their own video games.
As Hans-Ulrich Obrist writes, “traditionally, video games were created by a small and
insular group of people…producing games with a very limited perspective. This is now
changing rapidly… Artists are increasingly developing the technical ability to create
[their own] virtual worlds of diversity and inclusion”. Through these means, the artists
are taking this format beyond pure entertainment value to probe social, political, and
aesthetic questions. While video games have been the topic of numerous exhibitions
in recent years, most of these highlighted their legitimacy as an artistic medium or
focused on aspects of “game art”.
Worldbuilding is the first transgenerational, multinational show of this scope to
examine how contemporary artists are appropriating the aesthetics and technology of
gaming as their chosen form of expression. In so doing, this exhibit presents a plurality
of voices and a multitude of perspectives.
Additionally, in a “Free Tech Store”, an artwork by Jonathan Horowitz, visitors
can bring technological merchandise that they no longer want such as gadgets,
computers, hardwares, softwares and trade them for technological objects that they
do want. Similar to alternative modes of exchange in the digital realm, this work will
offer a physical place to give-and-take with no monetary transactions. Moreover, it
will find new homes for electronics which quickly become obsolete, often ending up
in landfills. Worldbuilding will also include an online component where visitors can
play video games from their homes or on their phones by scanning a QR code in the
exhibition space.
While fun and light-hearted on the surface, this show will take on some of the most
pressing issues today. Contrary to the discriminatory plotlines and stereotypical
depictions in mainstream games, these projects will propose counter-narratives and
alternative gameplay.
So, several pieces will present virtual ecosystems which re-imagine humanity’s
destructive relationship with nature, thereby cultivating alternative ecologies.
Exploring uncharted futures, these digital environments anticipate a more bio-diverse
planet post-homo-sapiens and speculate on new cross-species hybrids. Other works
mine history to resurrect and make heard the erased voices of the past. Certain video
games and video pursue fantasies about what if other paths had been taken, exploring
what it feels like to live outside of a marginalized body and creating visions of worlds
unchained from colonialism and enslavement. Giving us the chance to replay the game
so to speak, these scenarios foster empathy and reverse the violence that pervades
both the game world and society at large.
Indeed, for many artists in Worldbuilding, the digital provides a path beyond the
confines of the given. Take, for instance, artists that have designed avatars to transcend
categories such as nationality, gender, age, and sexuality. Here and throughout the
exhibition, the boundary between the real and the artificial, the material and the virtual
will begin to collapse. Through their interactions with the players, several simulated
landscapes and characters will develop the capacity to evolve and make their own
decisions, evoking the possibility of silicon-based intelligent life forms. Such projects
do not reflect on life as we know it but rather open up to life as it could be. For as
Hans-Ulrich Obrist contends, video games enable artists to “create new worlds, not
just inherit and live within existing ones”.
Initiated by the Julia Stoschek Foundation, Berlin/Düsseldorf, Worldbuilding: Gaming
and Art in the Digital Age will be adapted by the Centre Pompidou-Metz. Obrist
originally curated this exhibit in 2022 to celebrate the fifteenth anniversary of the
“Julia Stoschek Collection” in Düsseldorf, one of the world’s most comprehensive
private collections with a focus on “time-based art”.
For the iteration of the show at the Centre Pompidou-Metz, some of the artists have
chosen to present different works than those in Düsseldorf, and all the artists have
conceived the presentation of their work especially for the space of the museum. This
edition of the exhibit also will include nine additional artists, notably French artists
spanning several different generations.
Considered as one of the most influential curators in the world, Hans-Ulrich Obrist sets
up, in his unique curatorial approach, a dialogue between the visual arts and diverse
fields as video games.
