Game Engines: Videogames and/as Art

Gaming and its logics are now ubiquitous, from the attention economy («gamification») to the culture wars, and «game engines» power everything from architectural design to film production. How are the changing ways in which games are made and played affecting contemporary art and artists?

Hong, curator of the groundbreaking exhibition recent exhibition Game Society in Seoul, will talk about gaming’s intersection with contemporary art and how her exhibition explored new «adaptive» controller technologies to make gaming more accessible. Marijam Did, author of the new book Everything to Play For: How Videogames are Changing the World, will explore recent political developments around gaming, particularly the evolution of player communities and labour organising in the games industry.

After the discussion, there will be a screening (60 mins) of two very different recent work by artists exploring game engines: The Grannies, following a group of Australian artists going «out-of-bounds» in Red Dead Redemption 2, and Double Poser, in which Korean artist Heecheon Kim built his own gamespace using the Unity engine.

Hong and Did will be in discussion with Mike Sperlinger (Office for Contemporary Art Norway). This event will take place in English.

Did’s new book Everything to Play For will also have its Norwegian launch at the event.

Schedule

13:00-14:15 Discussion & break
14:30-15:30 Screening: The Grannies and Double Poser

Speakers

Marijam Did is a Lithuanian-Tatar games industry critic dissecting the intersection between videogames and IRL politics. Her work has been published by the Guardian, VICE, GamesIndustry.biz, Rosa Luxemburg Stiftung and others. Marijam was a Lecturer at Royal Holloway, University of London, and is currently a Senior Marketing Executive at a Bafta-winning videogames studio. She is an author of Everything To Play For: How Videogames Are Changing The World published by Verso Books in 2024.

Hong Leeji is a curator based in Seoul, Korea. She has curated exhibitions including Game Society (MMCA, 2023), Peter Weibel (MMCA, 2022) and Museum of Everyone, MoE(Animal Crossing online game project, 2020). She is currently a curator of the National Museum of Modern and Contemporary Art (MMCA) in Seoul and a curatorial director of the contemporary art research platform meetingroom. She researches cultural conditions that result from digital media and changing creative environments.

Films

The Grannies
Dir: Marie Foulston
2021
21mins

A short documentary about a group of players venturing beyond the boundaries of the blockbuster videogame Red Dead Online (Rockstar Games, 2018). Glitching their way outside the game’s official playspace, they discover the eerie backstage of its Wild West.

«The glitchy event horizon of Rockstar’s virtual-western epic.» – The Guardian

Double Poser
Dir: Heecheon Kim
2023
38mins

For his exhibition at London’s Hayward Gallery, Korean artist Heecheon Kim made a video installation built around an auto-playing game, here shown as a single-screen video. Double Poser is partly set in a virtual recreation of the Southbank Centre, location of the gallery and a famous skateboarder’s paradise, built by Kim with the Unity game engine. The video weaves together Kim’s skateboarding avatar, an elliptical spy narrative and diary-like snippets of Kim’s offline existence (including his friends teasing him for his lack of real-world skating ability).

This event is a collaboration with the Office for Contemporary Art Norway.