As one of many world’s most complete personal collections with a give attention to time-based artwork, the JULIA STOSCHEK COLLECTION has organized greater than forty exhibitions in addition to further actions and worldwide collaborative initiatives dedicated to the general public presentation, conservation, and analysis of artworks from the Nineteen Sixties to the current. Curated by Hans Ulrich Obrist to rejoice the fifteenth anniversary of the JULIA STOSCHEK COLLECTION, the group exhibition “WORLDBUILDING: Gaming and Artwork within the Digital Age” opens in Düsseldorf this June.

“WORLDBUILDING: Gaming and Artwork within the Digital Age” examines the connection between gaming and time-based media artwork with a journey by way of numerous methods through which artists have interacted with video video games and made them into an artwork kind. Within the phrases of the curator Hans Ulrich Obrist: “In 2021 2.8 billion folks—virtually a 3rd of the world’s inhabitants—performed video video games, making a distinct segment pastime into the most important mass phenomenon of our time. Many individuals spend hours every single day in a parallel world and reside a large number of various lives. Video video games are to the twenty-first century what motion pictures have been to the 20 th century and novels to the nineteenth century.”

The aesthetics of video games entered creative apply many years in the past, when artists started to combine, modify, and subvert the visible language of video video games to deal with problems with our existence inside digital worlds. Some artists have additionally delivered to gentle a critique of video games from throughout the system itself by highlighting discriminatory and stereotypical points of business and gaming logics. Extra not too long ago, artists have begun to harness the mainstream energy of gaming to speak new types of engagement that attain the large viewers of this borderless international business. From single-channel video works to site-specific, immersive, and interactive environments, “WORLDBUILDING: Gaming and Artwork within the Digital Age” encompasses over thirty artworks from the mid-Nineties to the current. Works from the JULIA STOSCHEK COLLECTION—a few of them particularly tailored for the exhibition— can be joined by newly commissioned works. Together with video, digital actuality (VR), synthetic intelligence (AI), and game-based works, a lot of the works are interactive and brazenly invite guests to immerse themselves within the multitude of different realities created by artists, spanning previous, current, and future.

“WORLDBUILDING: Gaming and Artwork within the Digital Age” will carry collectively pioneers of creative processes comparable to JODI, Peggy Ahwesh, Cory Arcangel, and Sturtevant, who’ve modified present video and laptop video games for their very own works because the Nineties, and extra particularly interactive works by pioneers Suzanne Treister and Rebecca Allen, who has a particular bond with town of Düsseldorf because of her collaboration with the band Kraftwerk. Massive-scale, game-based installations will immerse the guests within the work of youthful technology artists comparable to Danielle Brathwaite-Shirley, Keiken, LuYang, Lawrence Lek, Gabriel Massan, and the Institute of Queer Ecology, who critically mirror on socio-identitarian points with utopian visions and future worlds, whereas others level to a direct interplay the place the boundaries between art work and social dimension of video video games or the metaverse merge, as within the work of Lual Mayen, Cao Fei, Frances Stark, Angela Washko, and LaTurbo Avedon, who’s each an avatar and an nameless artist. Aesthetic parts that come straight from the world of sport programming, together with 3-D and VR, will discover a particular place within the time-based media artwork works of Ed Atkins, Meriem Bennani, Ed Fornieles, Rindon Johnson, and Jakob Kudsk Steensen, whereas video works with a distinctly extra narrative emphasis by Harun Farocki, Larry Achiampong & David Blandy, and Sondra Perry will supply perception into different points of the video games business.

With work whose software program parts can be additional developed and a collection of screening applications, the anniversary exhibition will always change over the course of its one-and-a-half-year run. This can be accompanied by a different program, each on-line and on website, in addition to a booklet and a complete exhibition catalog that may examine numerous views on the phenomenon of gaming.

at JULIA STOSCHEK COLLECTION, Düsseldorf
till December 10, 2022