Game Art: Marian Mayland, New Dark Age (2015)

New Dark Age is a new installation by Marian Mayland featuring two CRT-screens each showing footage from the 1999 video game Deus Ex. Specifically, the screen depict animated screenshots from one of the game's possible endings. Mayland calls them "animated fixed shots" as, in gifs, some elements are perfectly still (e.g. the camera, the object depicted) while others (animations, steams, some computer screens) are moving. Accompanying the two CRT-monitors are two LCD panels illustrating the ending sequence subtitles. The artist sees a parallel between the fictional world of Deus Ex and the so-called Real Life of 2015. As she writes:

In the game-world of Deus Ex the internet is under all-seeing surveillance by going through one common nodal point. In the ending sequence exhibited, this surveillance apparatus, and thus the Internet being routed through it, is being destroyed. The subtitles read: “...J.C....the net's going...the net's going black, J.C....” and “...no more infolinks, transmissions of any kind...we'll start again, live in villages...if you receive this, if you survive, then find us...find us...” This extracted video game fragment on the one hand relates to teleological conceptions of history. A utopian, almost eschatological event - the destruction of all information technology - is being frozen in a computer-generated loop. On the other hand the game shown and its aesthetic mark a historical turning point. In the cyberpunk game world of Deus Ex all conspiracy theories that were popular in the 1990s turn out to be true (the Illuminati, Aliens, Area 51, artificial diseases). Since 2001 and the events of 9/11 conspiracy theories in connection with spiritually-tinted New-Age Ideologemes have been massively circulated. Conspiracy theorists see themselves in opposition to the “mainstream” discourse, but have gained enormous influence through movements like “Zeitgeist” or Anonymous on popular discourse. Particularly neo-right wing movements like the German PEGIDA or EnDgAmE profit from the groundwork laid by conspiracy theorists of the 2000s and 2010s.