Games. Their Present-Day Role in Art and Politics
28 May - 06 Jul 2008
GAMES. THEIR PRESENT-DAY ROLE IN ART AND POLITICS
KUNSTHALLE wien project space,
May 28th - July 06th, 2008
The series of events and the exhibition scheduled to accompany the European Soccer Championship 2008 in the Kunsthalle project space centers on the politics and present-day role of games. Societies present themselves through their games, whose syntax, semantics, and performative practice both distort the prevailing circumstances and articulate the desires and ideals inherent in them.
Games have always been part of popular culture. Today, interactive PC games, online games, and Internet role-playing games form the hottest-selling branch of the globalized entertainment and culture industry. Its turnover exceeds that of the motion picture industry: the US producer of the role-playing game World of Warcraft, for example, registered 300,000 new players only last year, and tens of thousands of players move through the virtual worlds of Linden Labs’ Second Life every day.
Because of their enormous social and economic significance, games are the – hitherto underestimated – aesthetic and sociopolitical fighting zone of the future: in the forms of their motifs and their architecture, in their narrative structures and their use.
The series of events and the exhibition will explore the concept of games in its manifold relationships with today’s culture, technology, and politics and focus on interactive games as a medium of contemporary art.
Curators: Mathias Fuchs, Ernst Strouhal
KUNSTHALLE wien project space,
May 28th - July 06th, 2008
The series of events and the exhibition scheduled to accompany the European Soccer Championship 2008 in the Kunsthalle project space centers on the politics and present-day role of games. Societies present themselves through their games, whose syntax, semantics, and performative practice both distort the prevailing circumstances and articulate the desires and ideals inherent in them.
Games have always been part of popular culture. Today, interactive PC games, online games, and Internet role-playing games form the hottest-selling branch of the globalized entertainment and culture industry. Its turnover exceeds that of the motion picture industry: the US producer of the role-playing game World of Warcraft, for example, registered 300,000 new players only last year, and tens of thousands of players move through the virtual worlds of Linden Labs’ Second Life every day.
Because of their enormous social and economic significance, games are the – hitherto underestimated – aesthetic and sociopolitical fighting zone of the future: in the forms of their motifs and their architecture, in their narrative structures and their use.
The series of events and the exhibition will explore the concept of games in its manifold relationships with today’s culture, technology, and politics and focus on interactive games as a medium of contemporary art.
Curators: Mathias Fuchs, Ernst Strouhal