Kent Sheely, Bridge Creek, from the series Impression of Play, 2024
By overlaying wireframe structures on top of long-exposure video game screenshots, Kent Sheely creates a visual language that reveals the hidden architecture of digital gaming, a layer that is usually invisible to players but fundamental to their experience. The wireframes, reminiscent of the early stages of 3D modeling in game design, suggest the raw, unfinished elements of a digital world. By making these structures visible, Sheely invites viewers to consider the layers that exist beneath polished graphics and smooth gameplay. The unstable, fragmented nature of the wireframe overlays - seemingly breaking through the game’s environment - disrupts the illusion of immersion, reminding us that these virtual spaces are constructs.
In doing so, Sheely’s work might be seen as a commentary on the artificiality of virtual landscapes. While players usually engage with these worlds as seamless environments, Sheely peels back the surface to show their manufactured nature, as well as their fragility. The fragmentation in his work destabilizes the sense of reality these virtual worlds offer, creating tension between the organic and the synthetic. The exposed wireframes suggest a world in flux, not quite real, and always at risk of sudden disintegration.
Kent Sheely, Irradiated Snallygaster, from the series Impression of Play, 2024
The use of long-exposure techniques traditionally associated with real-world photography adds an intriguing temporal dimension to Sheely’s work. In photography, long exposure is often used to capture motion, light, and time in a single frame, leading to blurred or dreamlike effects. By applying this technique to video game screenshots, Sheely disrupts the fixed temporality of digital games. Games are usually experienced in real-time, but here, he blends real-world photography methods with virtual landscapes, creating something that feels liminal, in limbo.
This blurring of time and space calls attention to the complex relationship between real and virtual environments, especially when framed through an artistic lens. The long exposure in the landscapes makes them feel ghostly or ephemeral, as though they exist in an in-between state, neither fully realized nor entirely erased. This reinforces the themes of instability, not only in form but in perception.
Kent Sheely, Basement, from the series Impression of Play, 2024
Conceptually, Sheely’s images can be seen as reflecting the instability of virtual reality itself. Digital landscapes are fragile, held together by code and algorithms, subject to glitches and imperfections. By drawing attention to the wireframe skeleton of these spaces, Sheely is perhaps exploring the idea of incomplete realities, environments that are constantly being built, deconstructed, and reconstructed within digital spaces. Consider Ismaël Joffroy-Chandoutis’s SWATTED (2018).
These visual representations may also extend into the philosophical realm of digital spaces as precarious and malleable. Impressions of Play asks: what happens when the infrastructure of virtual worlds is exposed, when the illusion breaks down? By showcasing this instability, Sheely offers a meditation on the counterfeit nature of constructed realities, be they in digital environments or other mediated forms of experience.
Sheely’s compositions share a kinship with glitch art, where the breakdown of digital systems becomes an aesthetic strategy. The wireframe overlay functions almost as a glitch in the visual experience, a rupture of the visual smoothness that is normally prioritized in video game design. However, in this case, the glitch is purposeful, a deliberate exposure of the underlying code and framework.
Moreover, the fragmentation can be interpreted as a metaphor for larger cultural or existential questions about our relationship with virtual environments. Are we content to view these spaces as stable, complete worlds? Or are we aware of the ways in which they are constantly falling apart, needing repair or restructuring? Does play leave an impression? If so, can it be documented?
Impressions of Play is a modern day homage to Rosemarie Fiore’s seminal work with arcade games and photography.
Kent Sheely is an intermedia artist based in Los Angeles who takes inspiration from the aesthetics and culture of video games, examining the relationships between the real world and virtual ones and confronting the influence of psychology and politics in video games and digital spaces. Kent’s work is internationally-acclaimed and is noted as an important influence on the evolution of game-based art, especially in the area of virtual photography. He recently partnered with publisher Ubisoft for an exhibition highlighting their Photo Mode utility, and has been featured in numerous academic and games publications such as Blind Magazine, Artforum, WIRED, Kill Screen, and Kotaku.
LINK: Kent Sheely
