GAME ART: LEA VAN HALL’S THERE ARE SOME THINGS ABOUT PLACES YOU JUST DON’T REALISE UNTIL YOU LEAVE THEM (2024)
Lea Van Hall’s There are some things about places you just don’t realise until you leave them (2024) is a multimedia installation that intertwines video game mechanics, ceramic sculpture, and personal reflection to explore the emotional resonance of digital spaces. The project is rooted in Van Hall’s research on life simulation games as sites of self-reflection, exploration, and the projection of queer desire. At its core, the work presents a video game set within an intricate digital reconstruction of Van Hall’s own apartment, where the avatar is modeled after the artist herself. The game is housed within a sculptural ceramic frame - a representation of her apartment building’s façade - physically grounding the digital world in a tangible object. Viewers interact with the game by navigating the virtual space, engaging with various objects in the apartment that trigger animations and fragments of text sourced from life simulation games.
The project draws inspiration from object-based digital toys such as Pixel Chix and Tamagotchi, evoking the intimate, domesticated nature of these early interactive experiences. Through this, Van Hall foregrounds the deeply personal and often nostalgic connections that players form with simulated environments. The work also reflects on gaming as a social and cultural phenomenon, referencing a phrase encountered on Tumblr - Real gamers don’t play video games - to question the nature of playful engagement. This notion ties into the artist’s own experiences of video games as both communal and deeply individual, recalling childhood memories of watching a friend play The Sims 2 before eventually immersing herself in the game alone. Van Hall’s work articulates how video games transcend their digital form to become emotionally significant spaces. By blurring the lines between virtual and physical, object and experience, her installation underscores how digital interactions - particularly those in life simulation games - materialize into real emotional responses, shaping identity and memory.
This graduation project is completed with sound by Éléa Brando and typography by Tigran Saakyan, enhancing the sensory and textual depth of the installation.