EVENT: HOMO LUDENS: VIDEOGAMES TO UNDERSTAND THE PRESENT (JULY 20 - OCTOBER 31 2021, MADRID, SPAIN)
July 20 - October 31 2021CaixaForum MadridPaseo del Prado, 36
28014 Madrid, Spain
Curated by Luca CarrubbaDesigned by Domestic Data Streamer studio Produced by Fundación "La Caixa"Opening Conference: July 20 2021
"The exhibition Homo Ludens proposes an anthropological journey through the playful dimension of human beings through video games, a cultural, aesthetic and artistic phenomenon that is essential in contemporary mass culture. It is currently estimated that more than 2.5 billion people are video game players. Starting from the centrality of the game in our lives, the exhibition's journey approaches video games in a broad and holistic sense, and addresses the role of play as a regulating practice of human activity, both in the history of culture and today. Rather than being a history of video games, the exhibition provides a basically anthropological vision, bringing together culture and technology, industry and art.
The content of the exhibition combines examples of video games with contemporary artworks by the following artists: Rasheed Abueideh, Anna Anthropy, Matteo Bittanti and the collective IOCOSE, Ricardo B. Brasilero, Daniel Canogar, Robbie Cooper, Jake Elliott, Bruno Federico, Auriea Harvey and Michaël Samyn, Roc Herms, Agustina Isidori, David Jaumandreu, Ge Jin, Tamas Kemenczy and Ben Babbitt, Josep Lago, Jorge Paris, Nadège Mazars, MesquitaFMS, Hamilton Mestizo, Juan Naharro Gimenez, Roman Pilipey, Everest Pipkin, David Ramos, Linnea Rheborg, Mario von Rickenbach and Christian Etter, Pietro Righi Riva, Monica Rikić, Skawennati, Octavi Serra, Bill Viola and USC Game Innovation Lab, and Robert Yang.
In the exhibition, themes such as the anthropological roots of the game that are transferred to the video game, its million-dollar industry, the influence of video game aesthetics in other disciplines such as art and design, identity in a world where the real coexists with the virtual, among other issues.
The exhibition invites to an interactive and participatory tour in which the viewer acts as a gamer, although without playing at any time with the video games on display. The viewer chooses the itinerary from a central square that acts as an antechamber and distribution space of the exhibition. The visitor can interact with the exhibition through a device -the Coin-, an object that allows the viewer to build his or her opinion as he or she answers a series of questions. The answers also allow a collective knowledge of the participation of all visitors. On the large screen installed in the last room of the exhibition, a community of avatars is projected, representing, in real time, the accumulated data of all the visitors to the exhibition.
In this way, the exhibition provides a new perspective on the concept of the gamer and shows a gamified world in which life and play merge and in which we are all, in one way or another, gamers. This hypothesis, based on the work of sociologist and game scholar Daniel Muriel, is reflected in the video essay "Gameworlds: the video-gamification of the real" by Luca Carrubba and Daniel Muriel, directed by LaviniaNext and produced by "La Caixa" Foundation.
The exhibition also includes a catalog (in Spanish) that presents in detail all the works installed and proposes a reflective framework for their interpretation. This publication, which I had the pleasure of thinking, coordinating and writing, also includes texts by guest authors such as Oliver Perez La Torre, Flavio Escribano, Luján Oulton, Eurídice Cabañes, Carlos Scolari and Daniel Muriel.
The exhibition will be traveling during the next four years touring all major cities in Spain. So if you do not have time to get to Madrid you can see the exhibition soon in Barcelona, Sevilla, Zaragoza, Valencia, Palma, Tarragona, Girona." (Luca Carrubba)