2023-10-03 16:21:43
The gamification of society and the fact that the dynamics and aesthetics of games and video games enrich a large part of our lives center the new CaixaForum Girona exhibition. Homo ludens Video games to understand the presentwhich can be visited until February 18, offers an anthropological look at video games, “not with the idea of celebrating them, but of looking at them up close and from afar, to be able to see all their complexity», assures its commissioner, Luca Carrubba. The power of video games as an industry and as a cultural phenomenon are also part of the exhibition, which presents works of contemporary art games in an interactive tour in which the viewer becomes, for a while, one gamer.
He doesn’t do this by becoming a player in any of the games on display, but with the help of a device, the Coin, which allows him to answer the different questions dotted around the exhibition to make him position himself on a topic, he says Carrubba, which generates “great polarization” among citizens.
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“We didn’t want to offer a positioned view but generate questions, based on a critical and reflective look at the video game“, points out the head of content for Art Exhibitions at Fundació La Caixa, Carla Tarruella, about an exhibition that began in 2019 and which proposed to “study the video game to see what it says about us”.
«The starting point is the centrality of play in human life, we never stop playing and the video game is the evolution of this playful tradition that accompanies all societies. Whether you play it or not, it permeates environments that have nothing to do with it, like education, sex, war, or medicine», says the curator of the exhibition, which brings together 55 pieces by 28 creators, including video games, photographs, sculptures, videos and installations.
Carrubba assures that from the beginning he has considered the exhibition as a “mediating material to break stereotypes”, such as the fact that the game isolates. “The game is always collective, because even when you play alone you do it within a framework and a community, it projects you into a global network of relationships,” he says.
The business and art of the game
A video installation that collects the diversity of profiles of video game players based on real statistics welcomes the visitor at the entrance to the Fontana d’Or, in the antechamber of an exhibition that It shows how universal game mechanics, such as war or simulation, have moved from traditional games to video games.
The second area analyzes the ability of the video game industry to generate business and an audience of 2.5 billion peoplea third of the world’s population, through free games and eSports.
The way in which the digital world allows us to give idealized visions of ourselves, as “a laboratory of identities without consequences”, and how the social and political context also enters the world of the video game focus the field Let’s play with identity.
The artistic possibilities of the video game they also have a place in the exhibition, with examples of artists who use it as raw material to create other video games, video art or even sculptures, such as the interactive piece The machine that plays aloneby Mónica Rikic, who presides over access to the ground floor of the CaixaForum.
And, beyond art, Man playing too collect samples of the use of video games for the research of diseases such as covid or cancer or collaborative urban design. “It’s a system that encourages citizen participation to transform their environment, because it has an easy language to make contributions”, explains Carrubba.
The video game The Night Journey created by video artist Bill Viola or a game designed to recover the orality of Brazil’s indigenous communities are part of the section dedicated to emerging formats that are the result of the democratization of production systems.
The sample closes with some examples of how we play without realizing it and with the Final Screen, a large virtual agora with a community of avatars generated from the responses collected by the Visitors’ Corner to draw a profile that ranges from the most skeptical to the most devoted.
The exhibition is complemented by a round table, workshops and guided tours for different types of public.
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