GAMESCENES

EVENT: BETWEEN WORLDS (JUNE 23 - SEPTEMBER 24 2023, LONDON)

Second Life (still), 2023, Courtesy of The Photographers’ Gallery

Between Worlds

June 23 - September 24 2023

The Photographers’ Gallery

16–18 Ramillies Street London W1F 7LW

United Kingdom

 

press release

What happened to your first online game, website, social platform or virtual world?

Our everyday lives have been digitised and scattered through different spaces since the internet was created. Opening on 23 June 2023 – the 20th anniversary of virtual world Second Life – Between Worlds examines the digital folklore created by online communities and worlds. The social exchanges, digital artefacts and politics that inform our current experiences of online life are all explored in the exhibition.

Many virtual worlds – like Second Life and PlayStation Home – have been created and inhabited online, bringing close-knit user communities together. Second Life is a rarity to still be active – many virtual worlds appear and disappear within a few years. The end of many of these worlds, often linked to profits, have been marked by ‘end of the world’ parties – one last community get-together before the servers are switched off.

Despite many virtual worlds ending, improved usability has led to a resurgence of interest in online communal spaces. All helped by significant increases in domestic computer capacity, changing social attitudes; as well as the rise of VR headsets, metaverses and Web3 technologies.

Between Worlds traces the development from Maze, considered the first 3D first-person game ever made, and the influence these early games had on the development of virtual communities. In Preserving Worlds, a documentary series through aging and beloved virtual worlds, Derek Murphy and Mitchell Zemil invite users, developers and preservation communities to discuss historically important spaces such as WorldsChat, Myst Online and ActiveWorlds.

Second Life (still), Courtesy of Preserving Worlds

Reflecting more recent developments, Between Worlds includes screenshots from viral ‘meeting my internet best friend’ videos where relationships formed in virtual communities spill out of virtual spaces; and the EU-funded metaverse Global Gateway, an initiative designed to engage young people in topics such as climate, connectivity, health, which highlights the increasing interests of governments in virtual worlds.

Between Worlds also includes a newly commissioned video game with Glasgow-based creative developers Benjamin Hall and Frances Lingard. In the World Imagining Game, you are invited to create new and alternative virtual worlds while exploring the power dynamics, aesthetic possibilities, and legacies at play. Imagine your own visuals, characters, modes of gameplay in your world, and think about who your world is for, how it is moderated, and how it operates economically.

Second Life (still), 2023, Courtesy of The Photographers’ Gallery

Between Worlds marks a new strand of programming and research through The Photographers’ Gallery digital programme into the structural and socio-political issues around online worlds, and precedes a new PhD collaboration with the Centre for the Study of the Networked Image at London South Bank University.

LINK: Between Worlds

GAME ART: CHANG TING-TONG × CHENG HSIEN-YU'S SECOND LIFE: HABITAT (2016)

Second Life: Habitat, a collaborative piece by Cheng and Chang Ting-tong (張碩尹), consists of a high-temperature box containing 8,000 mosquitoes that fed on the blood of the artists and a video game that electrocutes the insects when it is played. Think Damien Hirst with a gaming component. Second Life: Habitat, is currently on display in Taipei, as part of the exhibition Transistors at the Museum of Contemporary Art, which showcases 11 contemporary artists challenging the very idea of boundary:

Second Life: Habitat is an art installation that aims to construct controlled ecological life support systems and consists of three large glass tanks, and it is a collaborative work by artists CHANG Ting-Tong and CHENG Hsien-Yu and a laboratory. During the exhibition, the artists will breed over 8000 Asian tiger mosquitoes and provide several hundred grams of their own blood on a daily basis to sustain the mosquitoes. A mosquito trap is placed by the installation, and when the mosquitoes come into contact with the trap, signals indicating their demise will be sent to a computer, which will be converted into avatars shown in the adjacent computer installation. Each of these avatars has a lifespan of 10 hours, and members of the audience can control the avatars in a game, ordering them to eat, drink, sleep, roam around, or even die during their lifespan. However, since the lives of these avatars are supported by real living beings and are connected to human blood or dead mosquitoes, can this game still be considered a form of entertainment? Through the artwork, the audience is caught in a moral dilemma with virtuality and reality entangled.

Ting Tong Chang (b.1982, Taipei, Taiwan) is an artist who lives and works in Taipei and London. Chang is known for his collaborative projects through a variety of media including installation, video, and theatre. After receiving his MFA at Goldsmiths, University of London in 2011, Chang has exhibited internationally. He held solo exhibitions at the Cube Project Space, the Museum of NTUE and Taipei Fine Arts Museum and has participated in group shows and commissioned projects in Guangzhou Triennial, Taipei Biennial, Saatchi Gallery, Compton Verney Art Gallery and Wellcome Trust. Chang’s major awards include the 19th Taishin Arts Award, Taipei Art Award 2020, Hong Kong Art Central RISE Award 2016, VIA Arts Prize 2016, and Royal Society of Sculptors Bursary Award 2015. His works can be found in the Taipei Fine Arts Museum, Art Bank, Hong Foundation, Embassy of Brazil London, JM SR Collection Mexico and private collections in Europe and Asia. Second Life: Habitat was created in collaboration with the National Taiwan University’s Department of Entomology.

LINK: Chang Ting-tong × Cheng Hsien-yu

LINK: Transistors

GAME ART: SAVEME OH'S BOOSTER NIGHTS (2021)

"Dance when the booster gets down": this is where we are now.

The virtual alter-ego of Oscar Wagenmans - a Dutch theatre director and actor - SaveMe Oh is an infamous character in Second Life, where she is often labelled as a troll, griefer and even virus. The artistic community of Linden Lab’s virtual world is terrified by the idea that SaveMe Oh could show up unannounced during a vernissage, creating havoc. In the attempt to prevent a possible raid, the sims (or rather her haters) have been trying to protect themselves by banning her since 2007, when Wagenmans first appeared online. SaveMe Oh’s interventions in Second Life disrupt both the social conventions and shared rules of the real world, which are replicated online. Why do people feel obliged to act in Second Life as if they were in IRL, instead of realizing their full creative potential? This is the key question posed by SaveMe Oh. This retrospective includes a series of absurd, irreverent, often grotesque machinima starring SaveMe Oh produced between 2012-2019.

LINK: SaveMe Oh

GAME ART: SAVEME OH'S DO YOU KNOW WHERE YOU’RE GOING TO? (2020)

SaveMe Oh does Diana Ross in this diabolic video about covidiocy. 

SaveMe Oh is just one of the several virtual alter-egos created by Oscar Wagenmans, a Dutch theatre director and actor. An eclectic figure inside and outside the virtual space, Wagenmans began his career as an actor in 1983 performing with youth theatre groups, subsequently as a comedian in solo shows and finally as part of the collective De Pinokkio's and Wagenmans and Strikker. Since 1991, he has been the artistic director of the Kamak Theatre, a theatre group of actors with learning disabilities, in Hengelo, Holland. Besides the Kamak project, Wagenmans works with amateur companies and musicians. His alter-ego SaveMe Oh was created in Second Life in 2007, where he appears as an irreverent, sensual performer with Asian roots, whose practice consists in creating sardonic plays on a variety of themes, including the artworld and current events. Mixing a variety of aesthetics (machinima, digital images, video, 3D animation), Wagenmans uses the character of SaveMe Oh to explore the creative challenges and limitations offered by Second Life, trying to disrupt the rules and real-world etiquette that users project onto the lives of their digital personas. His subversive tactics aimed at deconstructing and exposing the nonsense of the mechanisms governing politics and contemporary society, along with its fears and fetishes, provides a remarkable depiction the absurdity and grotesquery of human life.

LINK: SaveMe Oh

GAME ART: SAVEME OH'S ISOLATION (2020)

Machinima in quarantined times.

SaveMe Oh is just one of the several virtual alter-egos created by Oscar Wagenmans, a Dutch theatre director and actor. An eclectic figure inside and outside the virtual space, Wagenmans began his career as an actor in 1983 performing with youth theatre groups, subsequently as a comedian in solo shows and finally as part of the collective De Pinokkio's and Wagenmans and Strikker. Since 1991, he has been the artistic director of the Kamak Theatre, a theatre group of actors with learning disabilities, in Hengelo, Holland. Besides the Kamak project, Wagenmans works with amateur companies and musicians. His alter-ego SaveMe Oh was created in Second Life in 2007, where he appears as an irreverent, sensual performer with Asian roots, whose practice consists in creating sardonic plays on a variety of themes, including the artworld and current events. Mixing a variety of aesthetics (machinima, digital images, video, 3D animation), Wagenmans uses the character of SaveMe Oh to explore the creative challenges and limitations offered by Second Life, trying to disrupt the rules and real-world etiquette that users project onto the lives of their digital personas. His subversive tactics aimed at deconstructing and exposing the nonsense of the mechanisms governing politics and contemporary society, along with its fears and fetishes, provides a remarkable depiction the absurdity and grotesquery of human life.

LINK: SaveMe Oh

GAME ART: SAVE ME OH'S MORE FOR ALMOST NOTHING (2019)

Buy more! Buy bigger! Buy better! "Now for sale in the SaveMe Oh shop at Marketplace. Fully 3D animated art for which you need not only a wall but also a floor. The animated Animesh SaveMe is included in the artwork." Available here.

LINK: Save Me Oh

GAME ART: SAVE ME OH'S ALL OF ME (2019)

LINK: Save Me Oh

Game Art: SaveMe Oh's Tic Tac Pussy Grab Dance (2016)

It's really hard to make a parody of something that is already grotesque. 

LINK: SaveMe Oh

 

Game Art: Anna Eyler's "How to Explain Love to a Tape Measure" (2016)

Anna Eyler's new artwork is just brilliant.

"Evoking at once the nature documentary and peep show, How to Explain Love to a Tape Measure is a series of machinima vignettes featuring flexible, geometric forms interacting within the Second Life world." (Eyler)

Anna Eyler (b. 1987) is a multidisciplinary artist based in Ottawa and Montréal. Her previous work with(in) Second Life includes Leviathan (2016).

LINK: Anna Eyler

Game Art: Haveit Neox' "Fading Mask" (Berg by Nordan Art, SL, 2016)

Fading Mask by Haveit Neox
On display at Berg by Nordan Art, Jan 3 to Mar 31, 2016
Opening: Jan 3, 2016 at 11 am

About the exhibit:

Fading Mask

I don't believe you
lies
you don't believe me either
the human brain is made of story cells
we concoct the truth, don't we, rather than see it
then we march with the like-minded to affirm our stories
no, dear reader, you are not an exception without victims
but our mask can fall at any moment
beware, we enlightened ones, for the store of hatred we have,
or worse, for the amount of love
we'd stolen away for all the years.

Berg is an exhibit space sponsored by Nordan Art and curated by Kate Bergdorf.

Berg by Nordan Art is showing the installation Fading Mask by Haveit Neox and the exhibit Simply Samples of Her Repertoire by Mich Michabo from January 3 through March 2016. Exhibits rotate a few times per year. To visit : Nordan om Jorden (155,233,1001).

 

Also by Haveit Neox, City Inside Out:

LINK: Haveit Neox