Game Art: Rodolfo Peraza's "Play and Learn 2.0" (2008)
Play and Learn 2.0 (2008) is a political art game by Cuban artist Rodolfo Peraza (b. 1980, Camagüey, Cuba).
The critical text is a must. Excerpt:
"Game Over announces a digital screen with bold yellow letters flashing below designed iconographic silhouettes of Bolshevik leader Vladimir Lenin, guerrilla fighter Ernesto “Che Guevara”, and nationalist Cuban patriot Jose Marti. This visual constellation is confronted by the viewer when defeated in Rodolfo Peraza’s video-game series “Play and Learn: the trees prevent to see the forest” (2008). If it were only for these ideological effigies, every spectator-gamer could at first think of this game as a return to the Cold War imaginaries, where the political conflagration was waged on antithetical ideologies. But this particular image is also a dialectical one, that is, it does not come from the past, but rather emerges in the context of the post-communist condition. The prefix “-post”, as conceptualized by critics such as Boris Groys or Svetlana Boym, does not only refer to a previous clogged time, but to the continuities of its residues in our contemporary culture . In “Play and Learn”, the immaterial medium of the videogame console and language programming become a spectral site where a historical and discursive modes of communism inscribe this return. In a way, “Play and Learn” is always-already situated at the crossroads of two temporalities in confrontation: on one hand the past communist imagery and on the other, the technological driven present of post-communist time."
LINKSubmitted by Matteo Bittanti