Escape from New York

I had an amazing time at DEMO2026 at the New Museum in New York City. Part of it was the nostalgia of riding my bike over the Manhattan Bridge at sunset, and part of it was being without childcare responsibilities, staying up late talking with artists, and sleeping in. I was ready to get home after a couple of days, but it was a nice change from working from home here in Los Angeles.

DEMO is part exhibition, part working conference, and part presentation. In the US, there simply aren't big media arts festivals the way there are in the US, and something like A MAZE doesn't really exist here either. (I think of Indiecade as more like film festivals here in the US, versus showcasing experimental work.) The backbone of DEMO is the multi-hour microtalks from artists working at the bleeding edge of arts and technology, such as Joshua Ashish Dawson's water scarcity Bradbaori project that we discussed during his talk a couple weeks back. (Available for members!) So of course, I was delighted that there was quite a bit of games programming.

As part of Rhizome's curated block, one of my favorite talks came from Toronto-based artist and game-maker Mitchell Chan, who delivered an attempt at defining the space that he operates in–artists making games. "We all know once an art form becomes popular, there is one critical thing we must do: define subcategories of that art form ," Chan joked. It sounds simple enough, but having followed this space for 15 years, there has been a rapid expansion of the types of experimental games being made beyond simply "indie games." There are myriad ways you can build your diagram, but Chan suggested "agential art" as a better way to think about his work. "The game format is not simply a way to cram revealing assets or assets with symbolic value into the viewer's field of view," he sneakily jabbed at world-building projects with little interaction design. "The container has a homology of the structure of the [player's] life."

Peter Nichols' Crude Oil on display

One more notable piece for me personally is how normal video games are becoming in museum and gallery contexts. As part of DEMO, Mindy Seu curated a selection of 15 artists from NEW INC's cohort, including Peter Nichols' Crude Oil , a physics-adventure about a petroleium blob on the lam. It was a cheeky inversion of "wholesome" games, as you're actually the architect of climate collapse. Later at Onassis ONX's new space in Tribeca, over 30 different game and screen-based works were on display, including Tomo Kihara's AI-guessing work Deviation Game, an unreleased project from Tale of Tales, and a personal project from Filipinx drum n' bass artist Anito Soul.

And to cap off the trip, I made a quick stop before heading to the airport. The Whitney Biennial has Leo Castañeda's ongoing Levels and Bosses , the Latin American surrealist work that he originally showed me as an MFA project back in 2011! The work features a custom fiberglass chair, vinyl, and an ultra-high definition sample of the larger project. Elsewhere, Isabelle Frances McGuire's vivid, foreboding, and violent sculptures about the Salem witch trials draw directly on character models from DOOM. Two video game-based works, two different approaches, one explicit and the other only revealed in the artwork text.

It's a nice reminder of how much has changed since I started looking at games as art form. The shape of the future is here, if you just know where to look.

What Does Violence Look Like in Pink?

If you subscribe to Criterion, you may have recently noticed the “Corporate Thrillers” playlist that runs through that genre of film, mostly clustered between the late 1990s and the late 2000s, that uses the office building as a kind of pressure chamber: The Firm , Michael Clayton , The International. My wife and I have been working through that Criterion list lately, and what's striking is how reliably this genre surfaces whenever a culture is trying to metabolize what's actually happening inside its companies.

Jacques Tati got there earlier with Playtime in 1967, which pokes at the man in the gray suit and the shining new city built around him. In the 90s, there was a reckoning with 80s deregulation and corporate raiders. Office Space presented anxieties around the consulting class for the Gen X middle manager. The mid-aughts reflected what would become Occupy. Severance is a potshot at founder-led cults. Games have largely sat this conversation out, which is strange given how many millions of people spend the bulk of their waking hours in an office. In fact, game companies themselves are generally staid office parks, outwardly rejecting the ostensible chaos within.

Catmilk's Gossamer Matrix, an in-development first-person shooter she's been building for roughly four years, joins the small list of games willing to take the office seriously as a site—though it gets there through a hyperviolent sci-fi premise. Climate-driven flooding has shrunk available land, and cities have stacked themselves vertically into single corporate towers, each protected by a private military hired to defend shareholder value. You play a corporate peacekeeper. A business deal goes wrong. The building is taken. You fight your way through.

Read the week's feature

SPANDREL

On the radar

While I sadly didn't get to attend this year's Venice Biennale, due to my strict one biennale per year rule, I was pleased to see quite a bit of game-based work make its way to the festival. Two standouts were Li Fan-Yi, the youngest artist to show at the Taiwanese pavilion, and Maltese artist Adrian MM Abela's update of his 2023 Declaration of Dependence. Abela's work in particular caught my eye, having worked with game and animation studio False Work on their in-development game Spider Lily, who shared their involvement a couple of weeks ago. In Declaration of Dependence (A Game of Surrender) , Abela structured a stage with three zones to represent the future, the past, and the present. You can converse with a personification of Malta, who answers you differently each time.

One strange inclusion was the China Pavillion's "international art debut" of what appears to be a non-playable screen of Black Myth: Wukong. So basically, an ad. Art can absolutely be cultural diplomacy; hence the existence of the nation-specific pavilions, but this felt more like Poland giving Obama a copy of The Witcher. Given the number of other artists working with games in China (Zheng Fang is one of my favorites), the selection was disappointing.

On the absolute other end of the spectrum, Fumito Ueda announced gen ATLAS last week and declared it might be his last game ever. There's certainly a bit of introspection going around with Hideo Kojima talking about his own mortality. Kojima and Ueda, though, are arguably two of the most influential video game designers at wide scale whose influence can be felt outside of games. Kojima, most recently, showed out with his collaboration with Prada and director Nicolas Winding Refn, and Ueda's heartbreaking use of light and scale in The Shadow of Colossus and ICO is a touchpoint for artists and designers. The Gen ATLAS trailer __ rhymes with junk future, but his past work suggests something more serious.

I've loved Yuri Suzuki's work for quite some time, and it's been fascinating to watch the different permutations of a social-first approach to sound design and play. Suzuki is dyslexic and couldn't read sheet music, so he made it his life's mission to translate sound into objects. Looks Like Music (2013) translates color into music, and he recently redesigned his collective sound-making project, UTOOTO (above), for Salisbury Cathedral.

Citing Walt Disney's EPCOT and Rem Koolhaas' manifesto Delirious New York , Suzuki appears to be pursuing some type of physical attraction, but he's soft on the details. This week, he announced ONOMATOPIA as a theme park of "a place where sound brings people together, and where sonic experiences can positively transform emotions, environments, and relationships." I could absolutely see a sculpture park dedicated to his work and those who want to make the world a soundclash.

Hyphens

Intersections at play

Just absolute bangers in Damjan Jovanovic's essay on both the Backrooms film and lore, because it reframes a whole genre of internet dread: The Backrooms, he writes, give us "the feeling of having fallen through the collision mesh of the real." I'm so mad at this essay, because it's so in my wheelhouse that I wished I'd written it myself, but can now only wistfully look through the windows. Damjan Jovanovic teaches at experimental architecture school SCI-Arc and makes games himself, so as part of his ongoing world-making project, he takes an absolute scalpel to what might be the most non-video game video game movie in recent memory.

We tend to file the Backrooms under liminal space—empty offices, damp carpet, fluorescent hum, the aesthetics of the place you're not supposed to linger in. That's ostensibly makes them spooky, but Jovanovic argues that liminality only describes the feeling. What propels the work is what he calls "game-engine uncanny."

This is what makes the Backrooms such an important image. They are one of the clearest forms contemporary culture has produced of infinity after the exhaustion of grandeur. They still imagine an infinite world, but this infinity has no majesty. It has given up every claim to the celestial, the divine, the abyssal, the oceanic, and the properly ruinous, and it is lit instead by fluorescent tubes and covered in carpet. The absolute has become maintained space.

And that space is what happens when you fall out of a video game world and into something else entirely. When the Backrooms surfaced on 4chan in 2019, the caption warned you might "noclip" out of reality. Noclip is a debug term, the cheat that lets a player pass through solid geometry and wander outside a level's intended bounds.

So the originating myth was never really about haunted architecture. It was about discovering that the wall was never a wall, only an instruction the system agreed to enforce. "From this compressed image and premise, a collective mythology unfolded across wikis, videos, games, forums, and fan projects, adding levels, entities, maps, thresholds, survival procedures, and competing interpretations," he writes. The Backrooms are a reflection of an internet-native "folk cosmology" than structures a way of thinking and explains how a single image can grow into something much, much more.

CLASSIC

From the vault

Maybe the "video game violence" people had a point.

Mitch Krpata, in the No Fun issue, shared his strange relationship with Chiller , a violent game with the gore of a B-movie, but without the spunk:

The best games transport the player to another realm. The worst games do, too. It hardly mattered that the graphics were amateurish even for the time, or that the soundtrack consisted of a looping digital organ piece, a cackling ghoul, and overmodulated screams. Nor did it matter that, considered purely on ludic terms, this was one of the lousiest games ever made. Playing Chiller , I could tell that some threshold had been crossed—that I was standing in the darkest corner of a very dark place. It had no reason for being, except to immerse me in a world of extravagant violence, asking only for a quarter and a willingness to pull the trigger.

Read on if you dare

One to Watch

Over the weekend, I had a conversation with Chilean urbanist and game designer José Sanchez__ about the growing presence of games that seek global audiences through hyper-local themes. In Kalp Studio's Raahi, the auto rickshaw takes center stage in 1990s Goa, India, as you live the lives of others one pickup at a time. The front seat/back seat dynamic from New York taxis to Filipinx Jeepneys is a universal format for understanding a place through its passengers, but Raah i __ looks to introduce a new audience to the corners of Goa, from sipping on cashew feni liquor to working your way through flea markets like Anjuna. Whether or not there will be a pitstop to rescue an over-dilated party-goer from a Goa trance rave is TBD, but you know how much people love a good fetch mission.

Run-Ons

Afrah Shafiq is installing at the Hermitage in St. Petersburg, the first time the museum has ever showcased game work. Rhythm Heaven Groove drops July 2. Artists Petra Szemán and David Blandy's placemaking project about the "weirded maps" of Durham County is available to play. Amarcord: The Game_._

Did you know?

I know there are quite a few students in the audience. If you're interested in membership and are from an underrepresented group in gaming and/or the arts, consider asking for a "scholarship."

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