Julia Stoschek Collection: Hans Ulrich Obrist curates Worldbuilding – Culture

Anyone who wanted to slaughter three-dimensional monsters in a drizzle of blood on the PC in the mid-nineties of the last century (experience has shown that it was more of a the than a die) played quake. The graphics were antediluvian by today’s standards, but the sounds still trigger the hunt and shoot instinct today, a quarter of a century later: the grunts and groans of demonic creatures in battle, the barking of the pump gun and the “Hmph!” with every jump of the player character, accompanied by a permanent, quasi-industrial hiss and Trent Reznor’s soundtrack – it all formed the soundtrack on which this groundbreaking first-person shooter raced through extra-dimensional digital hell.

Said tapestry of sound is the only one that can be used as a guide when trying to play a variant made by the Dutch artist duo Joan Heemskerk and Dirk Paesmans, who go by the name “Jodi”. quake has made. The visual rendering consists of black-and-white lines that scurry lengthwise, crosswise and zigzag across the wall-sized screen, which dominates an entire room in the Julia Stoschek Collection in Düsseldorf. Of course you can try to play this “Untitled Game (1998 – 2001)”. But you could just as well tackle a “Ninja Warrior” course blindfolded. Chance of victory: zero. The destabilization of the usually win-oriented, teleological gameplay is made impossible, frustrating and liberating at the same time.

This descriptive handling of gameplay conventions, which the Dutch have been doing since the 1990s, forms an important strand of the exhibition “Worldbuilding – Gaming and Art in the Digital Age”, which the Julia Stoschek Collection presented on the occasion of its 15th anniversary in its 2007 opened Düsseldorf gallery. The idea of ​​showing game art, i.e. works that exist at the nexus between fine art and aesthetics, conventions and mechanisms of commercial video games, is ultimately a continuation of the focus that collector Julia Stoschek has always placed on “time-based art”. , i.e. variable installations and videos. The ubiquitous Hans Ulrich Obrist from London’s Serpentine Gallery was won as guest curator, whose incessant stream of consciousness is probably better suited to no medium than the potential infinity of a digital landscape, a virtual parallel world.

The focus of the show is not on commercial games and their design concept, but on thinking ahead, playing with expectations and transferring them to related areas of art. It will run for a year and a half and is intended to change and develop itself during this period. Another, so to speak, cloned version of the show will also be shown at the Center Pompidou in Metz next year.

Many digital natives owe their knowledge of history primarily to Assassin’s Creed and God of War

It’s no secret that the 30 works, which can be seen and partly played on three floors, are intended to attract a younger audience to the gallery, who otherwise doesn’t constantly rush to exhibitions of contemporary art. This is a meritorious advance. Because although some public collections have started to include video design in their catalogues, there are still reservations, especially in Germany – about one of the creative forms in which young people are unreservedly interested. The threshold for censorship is nowhere lower, and the threshold for realizing that it may have something to do with art is nowhere higher.

Many digital natives owe their knowledge of the historical cityscapes of the world or the Greek pantheon above all to them Assassin’s Creed and God of War. It is well known that the aesthetics of play is strongly linked to art-historical traditions, indeed that it represents a reserve of representationalism in contemporary art. A kind of romantic tradition is being continued in Düsseldorf: “Permanent Sunset”, created by an artist who works as a non-binary avatar by the name of LaTurbo Avedon, shows picturesque sunsets from otherwise highly brutal games such as in a continuous loop counterstrike.

Open detailed view

However, as said, “Worldbuilding” doesn’t keep the built-in promise of such games to be able to win something. In addition to the visually distorted Quake version, there is also a version of the original arcade game reprogrammed by the American artist Cory Arcangel Space Invaders: There is only one alien attacker here, but he is equipped with the entire arsenal of the otherwise countless UFO enemies. You can shoot at him endlessly and you will always lose in the end.

Many children and young people today spend a large part of their free time watching game-play documentaries on YouTube

In many cases, these are not interactive works, but game-play documentaries, a form in which many children and young people spend much of their free time on YouTube. As passive as the viewing of such games that have been played through may seem, they can be as formative and sometimes as knowledge-enhancing.

Open detailed view

This applies, for example, to Angela Washko’s project “The Council on Gender Sensitivity and Behavioral Awareness in World of Warcraft (2012-2016)”. After playing the role-playing and fighting game “World of Warcraft” online for years, she created a kind of debate platform within the game to discuss the often misogynist tendencies within the online player community. “What do you think of when you hear the word feminism?” – “I’m thinking of ogres, specifically Shrek.” This is how many of the conversations that Washko documented took place, but they also show a gradual, recognizable rethinking on the part of the participants as the game flowed.

On a different note is an excerpt from New Fiction, a project curator Obrist worked on earlier this year with Brooklyn-based artist Brian Donnelly, aka Kaws. In a mixture of physical exhibition in the Serpentine North Gallery and a virtual tour in the game world of Fortnite. A custom avatar based on Donelly’s x-eyed skeleton cartoon characters has also been added to the Fortnite cosmos. The fact that the artworks could also be viewed in real life provided an interesting counterpoint to the debate about art in NFT form – i.e. digital artworks for which proof of ownership can be purchased, which currently assigns vaguely formulated rights to the buyer.

Open detailed view

The biggest hit, however, is likely to be an installation that is more physical and tangible than anything else in “Worldbuilding”: Tanya Cruz, Isabel Ramos and Hana Omori, who together form the artist collective Keiken, have brought the concept of the virtual avatar back to reality, so to speak back translated. “Bet(a) Bodies” is the title of an installation in which visitors can lay glowing blue silicone “wombs” on their stomachs. Similar to the vibrating sensors in joysticks, these bionic prostheses also emit buzzing signals into the body. A meditative and surprisingly tangible highlight of this ambitious, important exhibition.

World Building – Gaming and Art in the Digital Age in the Julia Stoschek Collection, Dusseldorf. www.jsc.art; Open Sundays 11am – 6pm. Until December 10, 2023.