Event: COOL WAR: GAME ART ACROSS THE STRAITS (MAY 29 - JUNE 29, 2015, CUBA)
Cool War: Game Art Across the Straits
Curated by Rachel Price and Claudia Taboada
El Fanguito Studio, Cuba, Havana
May 29 - June 29, 2015
Cool War: Game Art Across the Straits is a collateral event of the 12th Havana Biennial held at El Fanguito Studio in Havana between May 18 and June 18, 2015 featuring Rewell Altunaga, Cory Arcangel, COLL.EO, Rodolfo Peraza, Yonlay Cabrera, Brody Condon, Joan Leandre and Anne Marie Schleiner. Curated by Rachel Price and Claudia Taboada, Cool War features "path-breaking game art since the genre’s emergence". Below is the full press release:"Fanguito Estudio is pleased to announce Cool War: Game Art Across the Straits, a group exhibition of video game art from Cuba and the United States.The idea for an internet—today the platform for most multi-player video games—emerged in part from the desire to enable ongoing communication between nuclear foes in the wake of a possible attack. One year after the Soviet launching of the Sputnik satellite in 1957, an anxious United States founded the Advanced Research Projects Agency (ARPA), which by 1968 yielded the first computer network, ARPANET. A version of what computer scientist J.C.R. Licklider had imagined in 1962 as an “Intergalactic Network,” ARAPANET was shaped by and shaped the era’s Space Race. In 1961, the year that the Cuban Revolution allied itself with the Soviet Union, Yuri Gagarin became the first astronaut to orbit space. In 1962 the first video game, Spacewar!, was invented by programmers at MIT and AT&T installed its first digital transmission equipment; 1962 also saw the near-apocalyptic Cuban Missile Crisis. Two years later Paul Baran published a game-changing paper on packet-switching technology, which facilitated construction of the first networked computer systems. War, videogames, and computer networks evolved symbiotically.Two video loops and select prints from Anne-Marie Schleiner, Joan Leandre and Brody Condon’s Velvet-Strike modify the “Havana” environment of the game Counter-Strike. The original interactive form of Velvet-Strike facilitated spray paint skins for players to leave anti- or non-military graffiti on the walls, ceiling, and floor of Counter-Strike environments. Conceived at the start of George Bush’s “War on Terrorism,” the documentation for this piece reveals surprising messages amidst typical First Person Shooter rampages through a simulated Havana.