introduction

Today, around 3 billion people — more than a third of the world’s population — play video games each year, making a niche pastime into the biggest mass phenomenon of our time, tendency rising. Many people spend hours every day in a parallel world and live a multitude of different lives. Video games might be to the twenty-first century what movies were to the twentieth century and novels to the nineteenth century.

WORLDBUILDING: Gaming and Art in the Digital Age examines the various ways in which artists have interacted with video games and made them into an art form. From single-channel video works to site-specific, immersive, and interactive environments, the exhibition encompasses works from the Julia Stoschek Collection as well as adapted and newly commissioned works. Originally conceived as the fifteenth-anniversary exhibition of the collection, at the time of this catalogue’s publication, WORLDBUILDING was shown at the Centre Pompidou-Metz: one of several spaces to which the exhibition will travel.

The idea of WORLDBUILDING is to present a long-duration exhibition which develops over time, adapting and changing through feedback and new encounters, thus mirroring the process of creating games. Part of the research for WORLDBUILDING consisted of countless studio visits with artists working with video games. In the conversations with these artists, we would learn about their peers, which would lead to more studio visits. It soon became clear that games, both as reference and medium, have a fixed place within artistic practices. Presenting games and game-based works within an exhibition context allows for very exciting possibilities of experiences — the expansion of the game space into the physical space, the ability to experience games in a more immersive way. The digital nature of the works also allows for the exhibition to be presented in different places at the same time, creating an exhibition as a learning system that takes on new knowledge from different localities, becoming a complex dynamic with feedback loops.

The aesthetics of games first entered into artistic practice decades ago, when artists began to integrate the visual language of video games into their works. Artists have appropriated, modified, and often subverted existing video games in order to reflect on them, as well as to approach questions of our existence within virtual worlds and the socio-political issues involved in the rendering of new realities. Other artists present a critique of games by exposing their often-discriminatory elements and stereotypical depictions. More recently, artists have also entered into existing mainstream games, opening up to massive new audiences and finding new forms of engagement. The anthropologist Margaret Mead wrote about how little time museum visitors actually spend in front of an artwork, that a detachment is occurring which allows for them to only look at works for some seconds. Facing games and game plays, visitors interact with the works in different ways — an attachment is created. Visitors interact with the work through a multi-sensory connection. The idea of time is altered within the realm of gaming, where people spend hours on end working their way through the narratives, missions, and challenges presented.

Traditionally, video games were created by a small and insular group of people coming from the world of engineering. With many more people having access to the tools for making games, this is now changing rapidly. Artists are increasingly developing the technical ability to invent, design, and distribute their own games on all continents to create virtual worlds of diversity and inclusion. As Anna Anthropy writes in her book Rise of the Videogame Zinesters (2012): “… what I want from video games is a plurality of voices. I want games to come from a wider set of experiences and present a wider range of perspectives. I can imagine — you are invited to imagine with me — a world in which digital games are not manufactured for the same small audience but one in which games are authored by you and me for the benefit of our peers.”1

Artists thus contribute strongly to the plurality of voices that Anthropy is calling for, and they present different perspectives by producing and distributing their own games. WORLDBUIDING highlights how the creation of games offers a unique opportunity for worldbuilding: rules can be set up, surroundings, systems, and dynamics can be built and altered, new realms can emerge. As artist Ian Cheng often told me, at the heart of his art is a desire to understand what a world is. Now more than ever, the dream is to be able to possess the agency to create new worlds, not just inherit and live within existing ones.

C. Thi Nguyen, in his book Games: Agency as Art (2020), argues that games are unique art forms that offer a temporary alternative experience of life and allow players to enjoy new and expanded forms of agency. The games we present in WORLDBUILDING often achieve this through the use of self-imposed constraints, reminding me of OuLiPo — the loose gathering of writers and mathematicians founded in 1960 by Raymond Queneau and François Le Lionnais.

By entering into these new realities, we are given the opportunity to reflect and change. The subject matters presented in some of the works challenge mainstream narratives, whilst offering a new ground for growth and learning. As Bo Ruberg writes in their introductory words to The Queer Games Avant-Garde (2020): “Described by some as the most influential media form of the twenty-first century, video games are played by billions around the globe each year and have a profound potential to impact how players view themselves and the world around them.”2 It remains ever fascinating how a field that is so rapidly developing can be understood and used in such different ways, presenting precisely the plurality of voices Anthropy calls for. For, as she continues: “… games, digital and otherwise, transmit ideas and culture. This is something they share with poems, novels, music albums, films, sculptures, and paintings. A painting conveys what it’s like to experience the subject as an image; a game conveys what it’s like to experience the subject as a system of rules.”3

The year 2023 marked the thirtieth anniversary of the exhibition do it, which began as an analogue game in Paris in 1993 during a conversation that I had with artists Christian Boltanski and Bertrand Lavier. In devising a new format for a show, I was concerned with how exhibitions could be rendered more flexible and open-ended; an “art-for-all” expansion into other circuits, which encourages greater levels of participation and interaction on the part of the audience. This discussion led to the question of whether a show could take “scores,” or written instructions by artists, as a point of departure, each of which could be newly interpreted every time they were enacted. do it proposed — and continues to propose — a new model of thinking about time, in which the goal is no longer to produce a finite “signed original,” but to disrupt the established modes of art production, dispersion, and dissemination. The result is a show that is always locally produced and uses reversible readymades so that no resources are wasted. Since its inception, the project has traveled to more than 169 institutions worldwide, where over 500 artists have authored instructions to be enacted by people across time and space. We hope that WORLDBUILDING will have a similarly long life.

The research for this exhibition showed that the importance of video games will only grow. It will be fascinating to see how the exhibition changes and develops alongside the ever-evolving role of video games themselves. While the exhibition at the Julia Stoschek Foundation in Düsseldorf was still ongoing, the exhibition had already been shown in parallel at the Centre Pompidou-Metz. There is no need for the works to travel and as WORLDBUILDING changes, it will become ever more sustainable. The Centre Pompidou recycled the previous exhibition’s architecture for the presentation of the show, for example. And the long duration of the original show, presented for twenty-one months, is a further important step towards more sustainable ways of presenting exhibitions.

First and foremost, I want to thank all the artists and artist estates participating in WORLDBUILDING: Larry Achiampong & David Blandy, Peggy Ahwesh, Rebecca Allen, Cory Arcangel, Ed Atkins, LaTurbo Avedon, Balenciaga, Ericka Beckman, EBB & Neïl Beloufa, Meriem Bennani, Danielle Brathwaite-Shirley, Cao Fei, Ian Cheng, Debbie Ding, Mimosa Echard, Harun Farocki, Basmah Felemban, Ed Fornieles, Sarah Friend, Dominique Gonzalez-Foerster, Porpentine Charity Heartscape, Pierre Huyghe, The Institute of Queer Ecology, Koo Jeong A, JODI, Charlotte Johannesson, Rindon Johnson, KAWS, Keiken, Kim Heecheon, Harmony Korine, Lawrence Lek, LuYang, Gabriel Massan, Lual Mayen, Llaura McGee, David OReilly, Philippe Parreno, Sondra Perry, Sahej Rahal, Jacolby Satterwhite, Afrah Shafiq, Frances Stark, Jakob Kudsk Steensen, Sturtevant, Transmoderna, Suzanne Treister, Theo Triantafyllidis, Angela Washko, and Thomas Webb.

As well as the artists who have joined the project at Centre Pompidou-Metz: Sara Dibiza, Mimosa Echard, Jonathan Horowitz, Caroline Poggi, Sara Sadik, Ben Vickers, and Jonathan Vinel.

I am ever grateful to Julia Stoschek, whom I met nearly twenty years ago. WORLDBUILDING presents a new chapter in our collaboration after our 2017 work together with the Serpentine on Arthur Jafa: A Series of Utterly Improbable, Yet...