Dusseldorf “BOB” smacks his lips while eating. It sounds horrible, like something out of a bloodthirsty horror movie. But the image that is displayed on the projection screen looks like a product from a toy box for artificial life forms.
An orange-red caterpillar attacks small stylized mushrooms with violent movements. Spellbound, I watch her greed and use a joystick to choose a starfish as an “offering” for her. But “BOB” isn’t done with his mushrooms, which a previous player sacrificed to him. He ignores my starfish.
“BOB” (Bag of Beliefs) is a real-time simulated life form presented by its creator, American artist Ian Cheng, like a zoo animal in an arena. Supposedly she’s learning I can influence her behavior. But I’m obviously too impatient for that. 34 video games are available to try out in the Düsseldorf Stoschek Collection; fortunately for a year and a half.
The exhibition marking the 15th anniversary of the private media art museum bears the meaningful title “Worldbuilding”. Building a new, different and better world in a playful way: That doesn’t just appeal to artists like Ian Cheng. He dreams of “having agency to create new worlds instead of just taking over and living in the ones that already exist”. It’s an old idea. Friedrich Schiller already saw that people only achieve a “beautiful” life through play.
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It would be a brave new world in which I didn’t shoot imaginatively designed black trans people with a pink pump gun from the 3D printer, but missed them. In her installation “SHE KEEPS ME DAMN ALIVE”, Danielle Brathwaite-Shirley appeals to the players to take social responsibility for themselves. I decide whether I will use violence like the “first person shooter” of an ordinary computer game or withdraw to stop the spiral of violence.
With the pink pump gun from the 3D printer, you can miss a targeted shot.
(Photo: Alwin Lay)
Gender identities are a major theme of this exhibition. In the video game “Pastoral” by Theo Triantafyllidis, the player controls a bikini-wearing orc through a cornfield. The setting is reminiscent of the ideal landscapes that were particularly popular in the 18th century.
Instead of the grazing cattle, there is a goat-like animal sitting under a tree and playing the lute; instead of the shepherd, the orc, whom the artist has equipped with a gigantic, exaggerated superhero body. But with that, he’s going nowhere. Because there is nothing that opposes the orc, no monster, no enemy. only grain.
The computer game in art
The collective The Institute of Queer Ecology invites you to become a resident of HORIZON’s digital commune. She provides the script for a world that is in harmony with nature, queerness and a self-determined life.
I can also witness the resurrection of the scaled-throated moho (Kaua’i “ō “ō) in this brave new world. Danish artist Jakob Kudsk Steensen continues the story of this Hawaiian bird in his virtual reality installation RE-ANIMATED. Diseases brought in by western newcomers were fatal to the bird. With the virtual reality glasses I put myself in the middle of his growing habitat.
With the virtual reality glasses, the user dives into the world of a resurrected bird.
(Photo: Jakob Kudsk Steensen)
The American artist Peggy Ahwesh plays with expectations, including those of a psychosexual nature. For her video “She Puppet” the artist appropriated the famous female protagonist of the computer game “Tomb Raider”. Ahwesh uses a chunky animation to cause Lara Croft to repeatedly succumb to her opponents, only to be instantly resurrected.
With the video she created in 2001, Ahwesh is already one of the “old masters” in this still young field of digital art. The Dutch collective Jodi, founded in 1994, is represented with a reprogramming of the well-known computer game “Quake” (2001). The result is the total deconstruction of its hyper-realistic imagery, namely an abstract moving image in black and white that can be modified by the user.
With such “early” works, curator Hans Ulrich Obrist opens a window into the even more distant pioneering days of commercial computer games. Cory Arcangel, for example, generated his video game “Space Invader” in 2004 from the hacked program code of the Atari space shooter of the same name from the late 1970s. Sturtevant, on the other hand, created a kind of digital clone of the famous 1980s video game classic “Pac-Man” in 2012.
The exhibition is not for the faint of heart simply because of the background noise. If you’ve had enough of that, we recommend Lawrence Lek’s “Nepenthe Zone” (2022). Exhausted, I cruise through the digital water landscape, the banks of which are lined with highly polished, futuristic-looking ensembles of buildings. A narrow passage leads out onto the sea, still and smooth in the evening light. Just get out of here, I think, heading for two distant islands.
But I can’t get that far. Because after a while, a sign suddenly appears in the middle of the water. I head towards it curiously; only to find that you can’t go any further from here. A virtual fence stops any attempt to escape.
Futuristic buildings line the digital water landscape. Anyone who wants to go out to sea will be in for a surprise.
(Photo: Sadie Coles, London)
I am thinking of the brilliant feature film “The Truman Show” (1988) and its protagonist who lives involuntarily and without his knowledge in a gigantic “lifelike” television set. He too flees – becoming suspicious in the end – across the sea, but finds the way out.
The exhibition “World Building. Video Games and Art in the Digital Age” runs until December 23, 2023. It is worth visiting again, as the exhibition changes several times during its run. Admission is free. Download the exhibition brochure at https://www.jsc.art/exhibitions/worldbuilding/ A catalog will be published in early 2023. The exhibition runs from June 2023 to January 2024 at the Center Pompidou-Metz.
More: Interview art collector Stoschek: “Gaming has permeated society like no other phenomenon”