The limitless creative prospects of video video games, from refugee journeys to wearable wombs, showcased in German exhibition

Greater than a decade after the late movie critic Roger Ebert made the controversial declare that “video video games can by no means be artwork”, there’s ample proof on the contrary. An exhibition that includes many examples of the rapprochement between gaming and artwork within the digital age, boasting works by 36 artists together with Rebecca Allen, Cory Arcangel and Suzanne Treister, opens 4 June on the Julia Stoschek Assortment (JSC) in Düsseldorf, Germany.

Worldbuilding: Gaming and Artwork within the Digital Age (till 10 December 2023) marks the fifteenth anniversary of the JSC’s first public exhibition and explores the numerous methods artists have interacted with video video games through the years in addition to the potential for future innovation. It consists of video, digital actuality (VR), synthetic intelligence (AI) and game-based works from the mid-Nineties to the current day.

“In 2021, 2.8 billion folks—virtually a 3rd of the world’s inhabitants—performed a online game,”  the curator Hans Ulrich Obrist, who can also be creative director at London’s Serpentine Galleries, stated in an announcement. “Video video games are to the twenty first century what films had been to the twentieth century and novels to the nineteenth century”.

The exhibition, which additionally consists of works by Peggy Ahwesh, Cory Arcangel, Ed Atkins and the Institute of Queer Ecology, will probably be on show for 18 months on the 115-year-old former body manufacturing facility owned by German artwork collector Julia Stoschek. A Berlin area, opened in 2016, homes her non-public assortment that spans 5 many years of conceptual video, movie projection, in addition to computer- and internet-based works. The exhibition may even open on the Centre Pompidou-Metz in June 2023.

Nature is a dominant theme within the present, as seen in Rebecca Allen’s The Bush Soul #3 (1999). A pioneer within the discipline of pc artwork, Allen is credited with producing the primary 3D mannequin of the feminine physique. Amongst her early endeavours was 1986’s Musique Non Cease, one of many first examples of 3D graphics utilized to a music video, from Germany’s most revered digital music export, Düsseldorf natives Kraftwerk. Within the present, she immerses the viewer in pristine digital landscapes inhabited by synthetic life types.

“The displayed works use expertise to show pure landscapes which are harking back to the German romantic painter Caspar David Friedrich,” Stoschek stated. “At a time the place expertise has taken us away from nature, some media artists, by simulation of nature, are working to compensate for this by working the opposite manner spherical, trying a reconciliation.”

Within the set up PLAYER OF COSMIC ༄ؘ ° REALMS (2022), the all-female British collective Keiken (whose identify means “expertise” in Japanese) sees gaming as a non secular act. “Once we are going into these video games, or alternate realities, we’re transposing our consciousness into one other realm,” says collective member Hana Omori. Guests enter an all-white room the place they’re surrounded by white mounds of salt. A glowing haptic wearable womb is positioned across the participant’s mid-section that emits vibrations, animal noises and gurgles. The participant lies down in a configuration that’s harking back to a psychoanalyst’s sofa, accessing non-public ideas and emotions. In response to Omori, the set up is an try to push bodily boundaries in gaming. “One of many greatest questions once we’re creating immersive expertise [is]: how does our bodily physique exist once we are taking part in a sport?”

The exhibition seeks to showcase the work of artists from marginalised and underrepresented teams who’ve been neglected in gaming for the final 20 years, “the place a majority of video video games are created by a really small, insular group of individuals coming from the realm of engineering and producing video games from a really restricted perspective”, stated Obrist.

Elsewhere within the exhibition, Sudanese creator Lual Mayen has turned his private expertise as a refugee right into a digital sport titled Salaam (Arabic for “peace”). Developed over 7 years, gamers tackle the position of an individual fleeing a battle zone, acquiring meals, water and medical provides. Mayen—who coined the phrase “gaming for good”—locations players in a job the place they turn out to be accountable for the actions of their avatars. The sport has in-app purchases which could be purchased with actual cash and are donated to NGOs concerned in humanitarian work with refugees. The expertise serves to remind gamers that being a refugee isn’t an id however a circumstance.

Formidable in scope and imaginative and prescient, the exhibition leaves little question that video video games could make for thought-provoking artwork. And whereas, at the moment, the implications of inhabiting a metaverse are laborious to foretell, Worldbuilding exhibits that we’ve the potential to code a future grounded in magnificence, creativity, empathy and spirituality.

• Worldbuilding: Gaming and Artwork within the Digital Age, 4 June 2022-10 December 2023, Julia Stoschek Assortment, Düsseldorf, Germany