GAMESCENES

EVENT: SATELLITES (APRIL 18 - AUGUST 25 2025, TOKYO, JAPAN)

SATELLITES

PRADA AOYAMA

18 April - 25 August 2025
5-2-6 Minami Aoyama, Minato-ku, Tokyo, Japan
Monday to Sunday: 11am - 8pm

“Satellites” is an exhibition conceived by Danish movie director Nicolas Winding Refn with Japanese game creator Hideo Kojima, presented at Prada Aoyama Tokyo from 18 April to 25 August 2025.

press release

A project organized with the support of Fondazione Prada and envisioned by the creative studio byNWR.

The collaboration between Refn and Kojima highlights their elective affinities, allowing them to transcend the individual dimension and overcome language barriers. The show transports visitors to a cinema-inspired interior set where suspended images of Refn and Kojima appear, locked in a contemplative conversation as they investigate the universal concept of human connection. The interrelation between two distant entities, also evoked by the metaphorical orbits of satellites in the exhibition title, is the focal point of the entire project. This topic resonates in Kojima’s game dynamics, where the connection of territories and people reshapes the idea of multiplayer, and in Refn’s cinematic poetics, where mental and affective concatenations transcend the logic of reality.

Both artists operate in the belief that today, the film and video game industries and processes tend to draw closer and overlap and, in the future, may merge into a shared digital dimension, offering new possibilities for individual or collective experiences.

The fifth floor of Prada Aoyama is transformed into a mid-century domestic space that transports visitors into an alternate dimension. The installation comprises six retro-futuristic televisions, where suspended images of Nicolas Winding Refn and Hideo Kojima engage in a deep and contemplative conversation. Their dialogue addresses many themes, including friendship, creative collaboration, new technologies and creativity, identity and communication, death and what remains afterwards. In the nearby dressing room a cassette player sits amid stacks of tapes. The tapes blend sound bites and cinema soundtracks, interwoven with alternate, AI-translated versions of Refn and Kojima’s conversation in various languages. Visitors piece together a unique, personalized version of the dialogue by sifting through the different languages on each tape.

LINK: Satellites

EVENT: LFG (APRIL 5 - MAY 24 2025, NEW YORK)

Kévin Bray 4 Exs (Écho des Luttes et des Conquêtes), 2023 3D print white PLA, video projection, sound
100 x 79 x 55 in. 255 x 200 x 140 cm courtesy of the Artist and The Hole

LFG group exhibition

April 5 - May 24 2025
Opening: Saturday April 5th, 6-8pm

The Hole tribeca

86 Walker St.
New York City, NY 10013

press release

The art world may be large, but the gaming world makes it look minuscule. Of all the creative experiences shaping us in 2025, video games probably rival music in reach—followed by social media, movies, and TV—while somewhere down with “poetry” sits “contemporary art.” So yes, doing an art show about gaming might seem silly because of scale: the diversity of games is so vast it’s barely containable, and trying to address their full aesthetic range through painting alone feels futile. Each frame of an open-world game like GTA could be its own painting—just as evocative, and far more influential.

That being said:
When the other option is obsolescence or irrelevance, I choose to jump in. Not just because I grew up in the ’80s, weaned on the Atari 2600 and Commodore 64, with the NES as the lodestar of my childhood in 1986. I drifted away when the Z axis debuted in Star Fox in 1993 or so, but still found myself sucked back in over the years—Minecraft, or even mobile war games, like a dweeb. I’ve also been curating exhibitions on this for over twenty years: from getting my college to fund a trip to New York in 2001 to visit BitStreams at the Whitney Museum, to bringing Super Mario Movie by Cory Arcangel and Paper Rad to Deitch Projects in 2004. At The Hole, I think if I curate one more “Post Analog” exhibition someone is going to revoke my curatorial license.

There aren’t enough galleries or museums engaging with this topic—and that lack of institutional support means artists exploring these themes often can’t afford to keep going. If you know how to code, you’ll make more money designing actual games than showing video art in a gallery. The hierarchy of mediums is remarkably weather-resistant: I have to sell scores of paintings to afford shipping a giant video sculpture from France. Even at major museums—like the Buffalo AKG’s recent Electric Op show I visited—early digital works still get barely any exposure. I’ve been chasing this type of work for decades and still feel like I haven’t seen much. Or at least, not nearly enough.

Anyway—this show:
It includes some of the most interesting current art exploring video games’ aesthetics, logic, and cultural impact. “LFG” originated as “Looking For Group” (and aren’t we all?) but these days more often means “Let’s Fucking Go,” the rallying cry of gamers launching a group quest, raid, attack, etc. Multiplayer games, especially RPGs, have made gaming surprisingly social: I had an older brother to play endless hours of Super Mario Kart with in 1992, but years later, coordinating attacks with ten strangers across five continents on a Discord call felt crazy and awesome. Whether storming a dungeon to loot rare armor, healing your tank while dodging area-of-effect fireballs, reviving your squadmate mid-firefight in Call of Duty, dancing on the corpses of your enemies in Fortnite, defending a fortress from Creepers in Minecraft, syncing getaway cars for a casino heist in GTA, or just grinding XP in the desert while getting made fun of—we have found our teams.

Video games have shaped an entire generation of artists—not just visually, but cognitively, emotionally, socially. They’ve trained us to think in systems, to obsess over world-building, to collaborate across vast distances, to inhabit avatars and alternate realities. For many younger artists, games aren’t just a medium—they’re a foundational aesthetic language like cinema or the internet. And it isn’t nostalgia or novelty—it’s infrastructure. The logic of a final boss, grinding, looting, leveling up, and glitching through walls are woven into how we see and make now. For artists raised on LAN parties and lag, boss fights and battle passes, it’s only natural that video games show up in the studio—not just as references, but as frameworks.

At long last, the artists:
Our war team includes Polish trio Bezimienny, Mathew Zefeldt, Kévin Bray, and a wonderful little Bryant Girsch painting titled Battle Boy, where a medieval-helmed fellow reveals his nipple-ringed bare chest. Probing the contrast between human player and game avatar, Bezimienny paints a warrior princess; Zefeldt’s blue babe wields a bow and arrow at a robot while Kevin’s chimeric beast clangs an axe in endless, fragmented motion. Matching Bezimienny’s sculptural little plants are Gao Hang’s First Aid Kits—a relief to refill your stamina after the battle.

Code, light, and glitch are covered by Ksawery Komputery’s interactive, sound-sensitive LED jellyfish Atolla in the rear gallery, and Luke Murphy’s crumpling and slouching LED panels, their custom software endlessly unraveling. Mashine’s painting of a horrifying JD Vance Pikachu is like a glitch in reality—a dank meme culture artifact where lack of oxygen or perhaps hygiene breeds cultural mutants. The nine-screen new AI piece by Tabor Robak also inhabits a dark part of this liminal zone where things go very, very wrong: Dave & Buster’s meets detention camp, as armed guards force prisoners to play strange games.

Skin and texture are the focus of Grant Stoops and Magda Kirk, both building figures for battle and leaving them smoothed and unarticulated, skimming them with an iridescent finish or a suit of overlapping tattoos. Botond Keresztesi manages to paint his own unique textures—gilded, pearlescent—to suit a vivid imagination that looks like a computer dreaming.

Janne Schimmel is the only artist to provide us an actual game to play. In a beautiful metal and crystal sculpture, Janne created a strange and boring video game on an old Game Boy—a poetic, odd journey of a little girl in a house, in a forest, with evocative chiptune music composed by the artist. To me, this work encapsulates my own relationship to gaming: forged in 8-bit, seeking materiality, memory, and the poetry that emerges from limited hardware and software. It’s about slowing down the future—resisting obsolescence and skirting death. For people my age, we fell in love with the radical potential of what technology could be. We don’t want to wind back the clock to feel like kids again—we want to go back so we can take a different path: one of hackers and mods, not the morass of social media and corporate gaming culture.

This show is a glimpse of what that path might look like —artists using the tools, textures and myths of gaming not to escape reality but to reprogram it. It's messy, ambitious and unresolved, like any good game still in beta.

LINK: LFG

GAME ART: JUAN JOSÉ MARÍA TIRIGALL’S DRIFT ALONG THE EDGES OF THE FRAGMENTS (2024)

Juan José María Tirigall, Drift Along the Edges of the Fragments, 2024

A plumber attempts to patch an irreparable system, wandering endlessly through the fractured terrain of a world built upon its own contradictions. The system is both tangible and conceptual, a sculptural landscape of ruptured surfaces and shifting forms. The leaks he strives to seal are unrelenting, his task Sisyphean. This is the premise of Drift Along the Edges of the Fragments, the latest work by Argentine multimedia artist and researcher Juan José María Tirigall, an interactive piece that fuses video game aesthetics, mechatronic sculpture, and projection mapping.

A research professor and director of the Graduate Program in Media and Technology at the National University of the Arts (UNA), Tirigall has long explored the confluence of contemporary art, science, and technology. His artistic and pedagogical commitments extend to promoting free software and the GNU/Linux operating system, reinforcing his interest in open, decentralized forms of digital production. His works interrogate the ideological underpinnings of digital culture while actively engaging with the material conditions of artistic production in the age of automation, interactivity, and machinic agency.

In Drift Along the Edges of the Fragments, Tirigall literalizes the historical and conceptual tension between contemporary art and mass cultural spectacle through an unmistakable referent: a kitsch Latin American plumber, borrowed from the lexicon of pop culture and the entertainment industry, who traverses an unstable, modular sculpture. This structure is no arbitrary construction: it is a 3D-printed reproduction of the infamous urinal Marcel Duchamp submitted to the 1917 Society of Independent Artists exhibition under the pseudonym R. Mutt. Unlike the institutionalized readymade, however, Tirigall’s urinal is in a perpetual state of disrepair, its surfaces cracked, its integrity compromised. The plumber’s ceaseless labor reflects an exercise in futility: fixing what is inherently broken, sustaining a system that resists permanence.

At the heart of the piece lies a dynamic interplay between digital simulation and mechanical instability. The fragmented urinal, set in motion by a network of motors and gears, continuously reconfigures itself, altering both the composition of the sculptural form and the terrain upon which the game character moves. This mechanical choreography transforms the work into an evolving, unstable platformer, a literal enactment of the precarious balancing act performed by cultural laborers, artists, and institutions. By embedding game mechanics within a shifting sculptural environment, Tirigall subverts the illusion of mastery often associated with interactive media, confronting players with a task that is neither winnable nor resolvable.

The artist’s decision to deploy a pop-cultural avatar adds yet another layer of irony to the work. If Duchamp’s urinal once destabilized artistic conventions, revealing the arbitrariness of aesthetic hierarchies, then Tirigall’s urinal exposes the absurdity of contemporary artistic production under digital capitalism. Here, the plumber, a character ostensibly designed to navigate and fix digital spaces, is trapped in an unwinnable game, his own agency curtailed by the very system he is tasked with maintaining.

Drift Along the Edges of the Fragments extends beyond mere critique; it operates as a living, breathing system of decay and renewal, exposing the fragility of both material and digital infrastructures. It questions the labor conditions that sustain artistic practice, the mythology of repair as progress, and the role of the digital artifact in an age where art is as much an object of preservation as it is an act of endurance. Tirigall’s work reminds us that art history, like any system, is not a static monument but a perpetually shifting construct, which demands not just interpretation, but some special kind of navigation.

Drift Along the Edges of the Fragments is currently being exhibited at the Centro de Arte el Obrador, within the framework of the exhibition Gravitating the ground.

LINK: Juan José María Tirigall

EVENT: WEIRD HOPE ENGINES (MARCH 21 - MAY 10 2025, NOTTINGHAM, UK)

Image: Andrew Walter Boggins

Weird Hope Engines

Curated by David Blandy, Rebecca Edwards and Jamie Sutcliffe

Exhibition: Sat 22 Mar 2025 - Sat 10 May 2025

Opening Friday 21st March  6-8pm

Bonington Gallery

Nottingham Trent University, Dryden Street, Nottingham, NG1 4GG

United Kingdom

 
press release

Weird Hope Engines embraces the culture of tabletop roleplaying games (TTRPGs) to explore play as a site of projection, simulation, communal myth-making, distorted temporality, and alternate possibility. The first exhibition of its kind, it foregrounds the practices of innovative designers, artists, and writers in the field of independent game design, and brings their work into dialogue with fellow-travellers in the field of critical art practice.

Weird Hope Engines, curated by Dying Earth Catalogue, is an experimental exhibition that reimagines Bonington Gallery as a hybrid lab—at once a testing site for the development of new worlding experiences, an active gaming hub, and an archive of maps, concept artworks, rulebooks, and gaming curiosities. Visitors will be invited to participate in both solo and collaborative gaming experiences that foreground questions of collective responsibility, personal testimony, and colonial legacy, reframing our expectations of gaming imaginaries as potent sites for rethinking social organisation, cross-cultural understanding, and personal reverie.

Migrating between the dreamworlds of science fiction, fantasy, folkloric myth, and pressing social realities, a series of newly commissioned play experiences by David Blandy, Chris Bisette, Laurie O’Connel, Zedeck Siew, and Angela Washko utilise a range of mechanics, from dice rolls and diary keeping to tumble towers and the recording  of personal anecdotes, to encourage new approaches to immersive play. 

Original displays by Amanda Lee Franck, Tom K Kemp with Patrick Stuart, Scrap Princess, and Andrew Walter and Shuyi Zhang (Melsonia Arts Council) showcase the unique function of visual art within gaming imaginaries, in which image making moves beyond functional illustration into complex relationships with collaborative storytelling.

An essay-film devised by the curators and based upon Jamie Sutcliffe’s essay ‘Playing Games’ (Art Monthly, Issue 484, March 2025) has been produced in collaboration with Adam Sinclair and Lotti Closs, exploring the shared experience of game space as a conflicted site of simulation and hallucinatory possibility.

LINK: Weird Hope Engines

EVENT: HOLDING PATTERN (MARCH 15 - JULY 27, DORTMUND, GERMANY)

HMKV Hartware MedienKunstVerein
at the Dortmunder U, Level 3
Leonie-Reygers-Terrasse
44137 Dortmund
Germany

press release

Holding Pattern is the English term for the tactic used by air traffic controllers to keep several aeroplanes in the air above a busy airport without allowing them to crash. This symbolic scenario unfolds the motif of remote control and mastery: the sense that human destinies are closely interwoven with the circuits of technology - interwoven with expectation and fear, danger and rescue, as well as geometry, aesthetics and even beauty.

What are the patterns that guide our lives? Do we design them ourselves, or are they written elsewhere, in dark zones that we can only glimpse but never fully see? Holding Pattern presents a selection of international artists who explore the choreographies, rhythms and algorithms that characterise modern life, the ways in which data is embodied and how bodies are transformed into data.

Panhans/Winkler,, »Freeroam À Rebours, Mod#I.1 – Installation Version«, 2017/2025 4K video, single-channel-projection, colour/sound, 16:13 mins, stage elements, crowd control systems, chains, handbags, motorbike helmets, carbon fibre, silicone, pizza-delivery-bag, functional shirt, novel, etc., variable sizes

The exhibition Holding Pattern includes major installation pieces such as as Hasselblad Award-winner Stan Douglas’ Luanda-Kinshasa (2013), a six-hour loop depicting an imaginary jam session in New York’s legendary Columbia 30th Street Studio; Turner Prize-winner Elizabeth Price’s SLOW DANS (2019), an elaborate fictional history binding together mining, data storage and the female ‘teachers’ of a mysterious underground ritual as well as the short videos of FOOTNOTES (2020), that reprise and annotate these themes; Harun Farocki’s Deep Play (2007), a 12-channel extrapolation of the physical, social, security and broadcast patterns shaping a high-profile international football game; and Stefan Panhans and Andrea Winkler’s Freeroam À Rebours, Mod#I.1 – Installation Version All Choices All Endings II (2025), which toggles between human dancers and digital avatars as it examines the interaction sequences (by turns violent and tender), the loops and glitches of the Grand Theft Auto universe. It includes Turner Prize-winner Susan Philipsz’ Ambient Air (2021), in which she draws a literal holding pattern across Berlin’s sky as she hums Brian Eno’s “Music for Airports” from the cockpit of a small plane, transmitting her voice via radio tower to Tegel Airport’s PA system. Also, Åke Hodell’s work igevär (1963, english: “to arms”), in which the titular military command-word gathering soldiers into formation is unlocked through repetition to suggest other, more emancipatory calls-to-arms.

Artists: Stan Douglas, Harun Farocki, Åke Hodell, Stefan Panhans & Andrea Winkler, Susan Philipsz, Elizabeth Price

The exhibition will be on display at the HMKV from 15 March to 27 July 2025. The opening will take place on Friday, 14 March 2025 at 19:00.

LINK: Holding Pattern 

EVENT: MÉLANIE COURTINAT’S THE SIREN (FEBRUARY 12 - MARCH 23 2025, SAN FRANCISCO)

Mélanie Courtinat: The Siren, 2023, video game.

 

Mélanie Courtinat: The Siren

February 12–March 23, 2025

Gray Area

2665 Mission St, San Francisco, CA 94110

press release

Gray Area is pleased to present Mélanie Courtinat: The Siren, a solo exhibition and the US premiere of a new video game work by French artist Mélanie Courtinat. Join us in the Gray Area Gallery on February 12 for an opening reception and guided playthrough with curator Wade Wallerstein.

The Siren (2024) is an interactive experience built with Unreal Engine that questions the traditional conventions of video games.

In the game, players embody a heroine wearing a shining suit of armor who wanders aimlessly along a beach at dusk. Once in control, players explore this beautiful and austere world under the watchful eye of an omniscient narrator. The narrator prompts players to undertake the seemingly arbitrary task—or side quest—of collecting bioluminescent seashells scattered across the sand. Only by collecting all of the shells can the player advance to the main quest: rescuing a damsel in distress.

Though rendered in ultra-high definition fidelity, resembling the hyperrealistic outputs of mass market AAA game studio productions, The Siren’s unique mechanics make it a distinctly different experience. The work elides a blockbuster main storyline and instead hones in on the droll imperatives and mundane taskings present in most video games. In this way, The Siren probes the meanings we assign to actions within gamespace, our relationships to the worlds we inhabit, and the motivations behind our playful engagements.

This experience is designed to be accessible to all visitors, including gaming newcomers, while also providing an additional meta-level of understanding for seasoned players.

The Siren is presented in San Francisco with support from Villa Albertine, in partnership with the Albertine Foundation, the Institut Français, and the French Ministry of Europe and Foreign Affairs. Gray Area is proud to be a 2025 French Immersion Laureate institution.

The Siren was originally commissioned by the Pully Art Museum as part of their exhibition Vivre l’œuvre/Voyage aux frontières de l’art immersif contemporain.

Mélanie Courtinat (1993) is an award-winning artist and art director based in Paris. Considering video games as a major medium, she focuses on their extraordinary immersive properties and seeks to push their boundaries. Her work, crafted through the use of digital tools, encompasses CGI images and films, interactive experiences, as well as virtual and augmented reality projects. As an artist, her personal creations are consistently showcased worldwide in cultural institutions, galleries, and museums, from Tokyo to New York. As an art director, she collaborates on commissioned projects for clients in the luxury, fashion, culture, and music industries. Mélanie also teaches video game history at ÉCAL in Lausanne and virtual reality at Beaux-Arts de Paris, while regularly conducting lectures and workshops in academic settings.

Don't miss the workshop on March 17 2025.

LINK: Mélanie Courtinat

LINK: Gray Area

EVENT: RADICAL SOFTWARE: WOMEN, ART & COMPUTING 1960-1991 (FEBRUARY 28 - MAY 25 2025, VIENNA, AUSTRIA)

Dara Birnbaum, Pop-Pop Video: Kojak/Wang, 1980, © Courtesy Dara Birnbaum und / and Eletrconic Arts Intermix (EAI), New York

Radical Software
Women, Art & Computing 1960–1991
February 28–May 25, 2025

Exhibition opening: February 27, 7pm

Symposium: February 28, 9am–6pm

kunsthallewien.at

Kunsthalle Wien Museumsquartier
Museumsplatz 1
1070 Wien

press release

Kunsthalle Wien presents a major new exhibition examining the pioneering role of women in digital art. Organised in collaboration with Mudam Luxembourg–Musée d’Art Moderne Grand-Duc Jean, Radical Software: Women, Art & Computing 1960–1991 brings together over one hundred works by fifty artists including painting, sculpture, installation, film, performance and many computer-generated drawings and texts.

A principally analogue exhibition about digital art, Radical Software focuses on the decades that preceded the rise of the World Wide Web and the proliferation of digital information and images that ensued, shaping artistic production and visual culture in the following decades. The exhibition is titled after the magazine that Beryl Korot started with fellow artists Phyllis (Gershuny) Segura and Ira Schneider in 1970. They adopted the term software (as opposed to hardware) as a metaphor and powerful tool for social change. The magazine’s wide-ranging editorial model and mission to serve as “an evolving handbook of technology,” decentralising access to information, predated the World Wide Web by two decades.

Beginning with works from the 1960s and 1970s, the exhibition spans a period from the first years of integrated circuit computing to the “microcomputer revolution,” which led to the birth of personal computing in the 1980s. The first works date from a time in which artists, poets, writers and filmmakers experimented with mainframe and minicomputers alongside mathematicians, scientists and engineers to produce and exhibit the first computer-generated images and texts. During these three decades the computer migrated from the laboratory to private, domestic space. Yet with each retelling of this history, the significant engagement of women with the technology has been largely overlooked. Set within a period that was also marked by the second wave of feminism, this exhibition documents a lesser-known history of the inception of digital art, countering conventional narratives on art and technology by focusing entirely on women.

Radical Software: Women, Art & Computing 1960–1991 also engages with contemporary questions of how technology interfaces with issues of identity and equality. The exhibition follows a renewed interest in the post-internet discourse of cyberfeminism, which highlights the role that women played in the creation of new digital technologies and engages critically with the entanglement of technology and power structures.

Artists: Rebecca Allen (b. 1953, Detroit), Elena Asins (b. 1940, Madrid–d. 2015, Navarra), Colette Stuebe Bangert (b. 1934, Columbus) & Charles Jeffries Bangert (b. 1938, Fargo–d. 2019, Lawrence), Gretchen Bender (b. 1951, Seaford, Delaware–d. 2004, New York City), Gudrun Bielz (b. 1954, Linz) & Ruth Schnell (b. 1956, Feldkirch), Dara Birnbaum (b. 1946, New York City), Inge Borchardt (b. 1935, Szczecin, formerly Stettin), Barbara Buckner (b. 1950, Chicago), Doris Chase (b. 1923–d. 2008, Seattle), Analívia Cordeiro (b. 1954, São Paulo), Betty Danon (b. 1927, Istanbul–d. 2002, Milan), Hanne Darboven (b. 1941, Munich–d. 2009, Hamburg), Bia Davou (b. 1932–d. 1996, Athens), Agnes Denes (b. 1938, Budapest), VALIE EXPORT (b. 1940, Linz), Anna Bella Geiger (1933, Rio de Janeiro), Isa Genzken (b. 1948, Bad Oldesloe), Dominique Gonzalez-Foerster (b. 1965, Strasbourg), Lily Greenham (b. 1924, Vienna–d. 2001, London), Samia Halaby (b. 1936, Jerusalem), Barbara Hammer (b. 1939, Los Angeles–d. 2019, New York City), Lynn Hershman Leeson (b. 1941, Cleveland), Grace C. Hertlein (b. 1924, Chicago–d. 2015, Chico), Channa Horwitz (b. 1932–d. 2013, Los Angeles), Irma Hünerfauth (b. 1907, Donaueschingen–d. 1998, Kreuth), Charlotte Johannesson (b. 1943, Malmö), Alison Knowles (b. 1933, New York City), Beryl Korot (b. 1945, New York City), Katalin Ladik (b. 1942, Novi Sad), Ruth Leavitt (b. 1944, St. Paul, Minnesota–d. 2025, Baltimore), Liliane Lijn (b. 1939, New York), Vera Molnár (b. 1924, Budapest–d. 2023, Paris), Monique Nahas (b. 1940, Paris) & Hervé Huitric (b. 1945, Paris), Katherine Nash (b. 1910–1982, Minneapolis), Sonya Rapoport (b. 1923, Brookline–d. 2015, Berkeley), Deborah Remington (b. 1930, Haddonfield–d. 2010, Moorestown), Sylvia Roubaud (b. 1941, Munich), Miriam Schapiro (b. 1923, Toronto–d. 2015, Hampton Bays), Lillian Schwartz (b. 1927, Cincinnati, Ohio–d. 2024, New York City), Sonia Sheridan (b. 1925, Newark–d. 2021, Hanover), Nina Sobell (b. 1947, Patchogue), Barbara T. Smith (b. 1931, Pasadena), Tamiko Thiel (b. 1957, Oakland), Rosemarie Trockel (b. 1952, Schwerte), Joan Truckenbrod (b. 1945, Greensboro), Anne-Mie Van Kerckhoven (b. 1951, Antwerp), Ulla Wiggen (b. 1942, Stockholm)

Symposium: Radical Software: On the first day of the exhibition, 28 February 2025, Kunsthalle Wien and TU Wien will host a symposium bringing together highly distinguished female researchers from the fields of art and science including Gerti Kappel, Nadia Magnenat-Thalmann, Margit Rosen, Zsofi Valyi-Nagy, Anne-Mie Van Kerckhoven, Ina Wagner and artists Gudrun Bielz, Inge Borchardt, Anna Bella Geiger, Dominique Gonzalez-Foerster, Liliane Lijn, Sylvia Roubaud, Ruth Schnell, Nina Sobell, Tamiko Thiel and Anne-Mie Van Kerckhoven.

Exhibition publication: The exhibition is accompanied by a new publication including essays by Tina Rivers Ryan, Margit Rosen and the exhibition’s curator, Michelle Cotton. Co-published with Mudam Luxembourg–Musée d’Art Moderne Grand-Duc Jean and Verlag der Buchhandlung Walther und Franz König, it features over 200 illustrations, a timeline and twenty-seven new interviews with artists from the exhibition.

Kunsthalle Wien is financed by the Magistratsabteilung Kultur der Stadt Wien (MA 7). The artistic programme is also supported by the members and patrons of the Kunsthalle Wien Club. The exhibition and symposium are made possible through the generous support of Art Mentor Foundation Lucerne.

LINK: Radical Software: Women, Art & Computing 1960–1991 

Previously

EVENT: JUST PLAYIN’ AROUND (JANUARY 21 - APRIL 26 2025, PORTLAND, OREGON)

Matthew Earl Williams, Twentysix Gasoline Stations In Grand Theft Auto V, 2014-24, digital prints, Each 16 x 20 inches framed, © m. earl Williams, Courtesy of the artist.

 

Just Playin' Around

curated by Nancy Downes-Le Guin and Theo Downes-Le Guin

January 21 - April 26 2025

Jordan Schnitzer Museum of Art

PSU1855 SW Broadway

Portland, OR 97201

press release

Once our basic needs are met, we humans have always turned to play and art. Children learn how to navigate the world by playing. Adults depend on play to bring joy and connection to others. The United Nations recognizes play as a universal right of children, and mental health specialists increasingly recommend play for its therapeutic benefit at all ages.

Artists often talk about their work as a form of play involving materials, ideas, and imagination. Play can be part of the process of making art, but can also be its subject matter. Artists create meaning from childhood memories, toys, games, and sport, reframing the past, interpreting the present, or imagining the future. Play is also a way for artists to seek release from meaning, to resist others’ need to interpret or instrumentalize their work, as seen in absurdist art-historical movements such as Dada.

Industrialized societies often treat play as childlike or trivial, an obstacle to productivity. Our cultural institutions define which artworks and artists are worthy of attention, often presenting art in distinctly unplayful settings, equating seriousness with cultural value. This belies the ways in which playfulness, surprise, silliness, and humor in art are able to engage charged emotional, social, and political issues.

Not all art needs to be playful, but in the end, play and art may not be so different. In both, we seek freedom, release, and community. Sometimes we create and receive meaning through our games and our art, and sometimes we just want to have fun. Just Playin’ Around is a peephole into some of the many ways in which art is play, play is art, and both are in all of us.

Just Playin’ Around is curated by Nancy Downes-Le Guin and Theo Downes-Le Guin. This exhibition is supported by The Ford Family Foundation, The Reser Family Foundation, the Jackson Foundation, Elements Roofing, the Richard and Helen Phillips Charitable Fund, and the JSMA Exhibition Circle.

LINK: Just Playin' Around

GAME ART: POLINA LOBANOVA AND JOSEF SEIDL’S PLAYFUL INSTALLATIONS

Polina Lobanova and Josef Seidl are a Berlin-based artist duo whose work challenges the standardized, boring, flat aesthetic of modern computing by exploring the tactile and intimate dimensions of digital devices. Their practice moves beyond the conventional interfaces of contemporary technology, instead creating artifacts that evoke personal engagement, ambiguity, and layered meaning.

Polina Lobanova and Josef Seidl, computer is a feeling, web interface, aluminium case, wooden plate, 2024

Their projects often integrate custom-built electronics, mechanical components, and unconventional interfaces, fostering reflection on the ways we interact with technology. For instance, computer is a feeling (2024, above) reimagines computing as a deeply personal and affective experience, assembling an interface from fragments of the artist’s browsing history to explore how technology could be shaped by care rather than corporate design. Paktomat (2024) invokes a mix of magical thinking and mechanical ingenuity, presenting an automaton that grants wishes - at the cost of one’s soul - thus questioning belief systems in an era of technological commodification.

Polina Lobanova and Josef Seidl, multiple choice game, aluminium case, 2021

Their earlier works also investigate digital-human relationships with a critical and poetic approach. DEWISE FR-ND (2021, above) stages an interaction with a supposed digital assistant that gradually reveals itself as manipulative rather than helpful, exposing the exploitative underpinnings of AI-driven personal assistants. Pocket Stones (2022) introduces an element of chance and materiality through a vending machine that dispenses unique stones, encouraging users to reconsider their engagement with randomness and symbolic meaning. Meanwhile, Ordinary Object (2020) juxtaposes physical and digital representations of stones, questioning whether raw materiality or data-driven abstraction holds more reality.

LINK: Polina Lobanova and Josef Seidl (all images courtesy the artists)

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, There are some things about places you just don’t realise until you leave them, 2024 ceramic, video game; sound: Éléa Brando, typography:Tigran Saakyan, installation view; photo: HFBK

Lea Van Hall, There are some things about places you just don’t realise until you leave them, 2024 ceramic, video game; sound: Éléa Brando, typography:Tigran Saakyan, installation view; photo: HFBK

Lea Van Hall, There are some things about places you just don’t realise until you leave them, 2024 ceramic, video game; sound: Éléa Brando, typography:Tigran Saakyan, installation view; photo: HFBK

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.

Lea Van Hall is a 2024 graduate of HFBK Hamburg, Germany.