THE VIRTUAL FRONTIER
digital video, color, sound, 3’, 2020, The Netherlands
Created by Sjors Rigters
vral.org
The popular video game Minecraft exemplifies the inner contradictions of the digital age. Lauded by many pundits as a highly creative form of entertainment, the so-called “digital LEGO” is a powerful vessel for neoliberal ideologies and hyper-capitalistic imperatives, with its frenzy of accumulation, extraction, circulation, production, and exploitation. An effective indoctrination tool now pervasive in thousands of US elementary schools, Minecraft is a techno-dream of endless growth, a manifesto for the perpetuation of devastating patterns of consumption, competition, and destruction. Informed by colonialist principles, its gameplay elevates numbing grinding routines into a recipe for the good life, casting the player as both a conqueror and an entrepreneur. In his video The Virtual Frontier, Dutch designer Sjors Rigters brings to the foreground the toxic message of one of the most successful video games of all time.
Sjors Rigters (b. 1995) is a graphic designer specializing in visual identity and editorial design. After receiving his BA in Graphic Design at the Royal Academy of Art, The Hague, he opened his own studio. Sjors lives and works in Rotterdam, The Netherlands.
ARCHITECTURE WITH GAMES IN THE TITLE
Digital video (1920 x 1080), color, sound, 18' (6’ X 3), 2020 (Croatia)
Created by Mario Mu, 2020
November 26 - December 10 2020
Introduced by Matteo Bittanti
Architecture with Games in the Title focuses on the convergence between spatial memory and the architecture of games through the narrative framework of a dialogue. Mu compares the casualties of financial crises to video game players, forced to navigate a rigidly controlled “gamified” setting where trial-and-error is glorified as the only way to reach symbolic “achievements”. Created with Unity 3D, the scene depicts an office space replete with desks, computers, chairs, and other amenities of the modern working environment. Walls appear and disappear depending on the location of unseen characters, the “flexible workers” of the neoliberal world. This is a space without shadows, at once bright, warm, and phantasmatic. As the unseen characters engage in a conversation about architecture and memory, bots and ghosts, the environment slowly burns.
The artistic practice of Croatian artist Mario Mu revolves around projects which are often constructed as extended gaming platforms. In addition to sound and drawing, his preferred media often include elements of game design, 3D animation, and performance. A student of Hito Steyerl, Mu received an MFA in Berlin from the University of the Arts (UdK) in Berlin in 2017, a BFA with a major in Painting from the Academy of Fine Arts in Zagreb, in 2015, and an MA from the Faculty of Graphic Arts in 2012 from the same institution. Between 2016 and 2017, Mu was an active member of the Research Center for the Proxy Politics in Berlin. He has been working on several LARP events as an author, collaborator and/or performer at Play Co London and Zagreb, Pakhuis de Zwijger in Amsterdam, Galerie gr_und, Acud, and UdK in Berlin. Mu is currently working on a new game project initiated by the Portuguese artist Odete and supported by Maat Museum and Boca Bienal.
ANIMAL CROSSING: ALL MINE
digital video, color, sound, 7’ 05”, 2020 (United States)
Created by Brent Watanabe
Introduced by Matteo Bittanti
Conspicuous consumption is the implicit goal of innumerable video games, but Animal Crossing: New Horizons is, by far, the most shameless celebration of capitalism. Released in March 2020, the latest installment of the popular series became the most popular video game during the most intense months of the Covid-19 lockdown in Europe and the United States. A commercial triumph – more than twenty two million copies sold in four months – New Horizons gave players the possibility to escape from their brick-and-mortar homes and relocate to a minuscole island in the middle of the ocean. All they had to do was to purchase the innocent sounding “Deserted Island Getaway Package” from a development company called Nook Inc. Lured by the promise of playful evasion and endless growth, American artist Brent Watanabe soon found himself enslaved by perpetual debt, surrounded by a mountain of waste, and forced to compulsively perform bullshit jobs. An unofficial adaptation of Maurizio Lazzarato’s The Making of the Indebted Man, Animal Crossing: New Horizons is one of the most sophisticated simulation of neoliberalism ever concocted: suffice to say that players must take a mortgage on their virtual houses to start “playing”. Assuming the role of a modern day Robinson Crusoe with entrepreneurial skills, Watanabe spent more than one hundred fifty hours hoarding as many consumer goods as possible and displaying them on his island. He documented his performance with a machinima.
Brent Watanabe is an artist combining a background in traditional materials and practices (drawing, sculpture) with emerging technologies (computer programming, electronics), exploring an artistic field still uncharted. For over a decade, Watanabe has been creating computer-controlled gallery installations populated by kinetic sculpture, drawing, projection, and sound. His 2016 project, San Andreas Deer Cam was streamed live on the internet, had over 800,000 visitors in the first three months, and was mentioned in several international publications, including New York Magazine, the BBC, and WIRED. Watanabe has participated in several group shows and screenings nationally and internationally, including Through Machine Eyes curated by James Bridle at the NeMe Arts Center, in Limassol, Cyprus, Game Changers at MassArt Art Museum, in Boston and Playmode at the MATT Museum, in Lisbon, Portugal. He has had recent solo exhibitions at SOIL Art Gallery (Seattle, 2006), McLeod Residency (Seattle, 2008), Jack Straw New Media Gallery (Seattle, 2009), Gallery 4Culture (Seattle, 2011), Anchor Art Space (Anacortes, Washington State, 2013), and Bumbershoot Music and Arts Festival (Seattle, 2016).
