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You’re in a computer game, Max! positions the work of 8 artists in a navigational 3-dimensional digital space, within which muted videos overlap and collide to form new combinations, and a user-performed soundtrack of the artists’ sound works provides the backdrop. As bricks and mortar galleries are forced to close their doors due to the onset of Covid 19, the Internet is now the only place to see new art. Many of these commercial galleries are left with no option but to move online. This exhibition puts forward an alternative model for looking at images on the Internet, rejecting a neutral aesthetic where the viewer remains passive, in favour of a game-like environment that acknowledges the materiality of the Internet to explore the point at which code becomes image.

The exhibition borrows its title from a line in the computer game Max Payne. As Alex Galloway notes in his 2006 book “Gaming. Essays on Algorithmic Culture”, Max Payne deliberately breaks the fourth wall when its main character is faced with the horrific realisation that his every move is being externally controlled by an outside agent - the player. At that point in the game, the space between the digital and non-digital becomes blurred by a conscious in-game acknowledgment of the outside world. Similarly, You're in a computer game, Max!, overcomes the division between digital and non-digital space by hijacking the user's webcam. When the user grants their permission, a chroma-rotten image of the webcam view is cast directly into the middle of the show. Upon entering, viewers are faced with a real-time image of themselves alongside a stream of artists' video works, including the perpetually trudging character of Daniel Shanken’s live edited video, Gaoler, which Shanken has built to trawl the corners of the web, in real-time, for its content. As viewers look at themselves looking at the work, this self-conscious act of looking, framed with a 16:9 rectangle, hints at an involvement on the part of the viewer usually lacking from the online art experience.

What happens when viewing art becomes something other than what it is in a gallery? You're in a computer game, Max! intentionally antagonises the traditional gallery model of viewing art online. Art seen on the Internet is often framed according to protocols borrowed from the white cube; a very neutral aesthetic that doesn't do anything to challenge usual in-browser behaviour. Within this environment the viewer remains largely passive; we are simply asked to scroll vertically through images and videos, sometimes set within blocks of text.

In “Gaming. Essays on Algorithmic Culture” Galloway also talks about what he calls the ‘ambient state’ within computer games - that point within the game where the action stops and the player is faced with a purely aesthetic looping experience. These ambient repetitions of subtle movements are designed to lure the player in, and engage them in more action. Within art, however, the viewer is involved in a passive form of reception and contemplation, and this return to action through code will never come. In this sense You're in a computer game, Max! becomes a parody of this viewer passivity. Our actions lead only to more looking; we become caught up in an ambient loop that only reveals more images, or different combinations of the same images.

To explore new possibilities and break out of this ‘ambient state’, the artists selected for You’re in a computer game, Max! were invited to make new work in response to the original format of the website. Using the arrangement of video and audio pieces in the 3D viewport as a starting point, Daria Blum, Robert Cervera, Bill Leslie and Jonas Pequeno made new video works for the exhibition.

The four new works extend the show in four very different ways. By projecting content from the show onto a block of wet, mouldable, clay, Bill Leslie’s video, Projection Modelling (2020), brings the web-based interface of You’re in a computer game, Max! into the physical space of his studio. Shot in one take, the video remains unedited and raw, like the clay he sculpts to distort and shape the projection. As the work progresses we become acutely aware of the material interplay between image and object.

Daria Blum’s video response, WHHHHHTT?? (2020), goes inside the screen to parody how we engage with digital media. The work focuses on Daria’s subjective experience of the screen from the projected point of view of her computer webcam. Throughout the work we are left guessing as to what exactly the artist might be looking at.

Robert Cervera's Grandpa's Footsteps, 2020, uses Jonas Pequeno's droning soundtrack from the show, alongside music created using computer cooling tubes as wind instruments, to remind us of the materiality of digital sound and image. The resulting soundtrack, coded through a visible text-based graphic interface similar to those used by algorave performers, is a visual nod to the signs and systems in-between what is sent and what is received within digital media. The walking figure, borrowed from Daniel Shanken’s video, Gaoler, references the idea of the ‘ambient state’ underlying the show, as something left unfulfilled - of going somewhere but never arriving.

Jonas Pequeno’s work, Hans Zimmer Exploding (2020), breaks away from directly visually referencing You’re in a computer game, Max! to build a strobing, schizophrenic video that sits somewhere between the handmade and the machine-generated. Throughout the work the artist points to the painterly style of procedural imagery generated by machine learning systems, and we are left wondering about the work's genesis.

All four videos are listed within the ‘RESPONSE’ menu of the homepage. Clicking through these links reveals an accompanying ‘INPUT’ menu, where video works by Keiken, Gibson/Martelli, Daniel Shanken and Katriona Beales, (muted within the main section of the show to allow them to autoplay within the 3D space) can be seen and heard in full.
Katriona Beales / Daria Blum / Robert Cervera / Gibson/Martelli / Keiken / Bill Leslie / Jonas Pequeno / Daniel Shanken
22nd April - 21st July 2020
Daniel Shanken

Daniel Shanken is an artist from Los Angeles, living and working in Hong Kong. He is currently an Assistant Professor at the Academy of Visual Arts, Hong Kong. Working across different disciplines and media, his practice focuses on how meaning and perception are generated and altered through interactions with technology and external stimuli. His work examines the influence of information systems and how they are embedded within our cognitive processes. He has exhibited at venues such as ICA London, Art Basel Hong Kong, Whitechapel Gallery, CCA Glasgow, Nottingham Contemporary, CFCCA Manchester, V Art Center Shanghai, and Kiasma Helsinki.

www.dshanken.com×
Gibson Martelli

Martelli and Gibson live and work in London. They are graduates of RMIT with a joint PhD in immersivity and somatic sensing. Worldwide commissions include residencies in North America, China, Ireland, Australia and New Zealand and exhibitions at the Barbican, Centro de Arte Moderna, Lisbon, Detroit Institute of Arts, and the Venice Biennale. 

The artists are currently working on an AI and machine learning project with collaborators at Goldsmiths University of London and the Creative Computing Institute UAL. Gibson is Associate Professor at Centre for Dance Research, Coventry University. 

Solo shows include Expanded Fields (2019) Limerick City Gallery of Art, ‘Big Bob’ (2015) at Jaffe-Friede Gallery in Hanover, USA, ‘MAN A’ (2015) at UNION gallery, London and ‘80ºN’ (2014) at QUAD Gallery in Derby. They have exhibited in London in group shows: ‘Enter Through The Headset 4’ (2019) at Gazelli Art House, ‘Observation Rooms’ (2019) at Arthouse 1,‘This Is Where We Came In’ (2018) at Angus Hughes Gallery, ’Splintered Binary’ (2017) at Gossamer Fog and ‘Now Play This’ (2017) at Somerset House.×
Katriona Beales

Katriona Beales is an internationally exhibited artist who makes digital artefacts, objects, moving image and installation. Her work responds to the social implications of new technologies, in particular mental health and digital culture. Katriona’s interdisciplinary project ‘Are we all addicts now?’ was supported by The Wellcome Trust and Arts Council England and was shown at Furtherfield, London in 2017. In 2018 she exhibited new commissions at the V&A and Science Gallery London. Most recently she is showed a participatory green screen installation 'As we are but not as you know us' at Autograph (Feb-March 2020) which was developed with families with children with complex needs. Katriona received an MA from Chelsea College of Arts and has an artist profile on Rhizome.org  ×
Keiken

Keiken, Japanese for experience, is a cross-dimensional collaborative practice based in London and Berlin and founded in 2015 by artists Tanya Cruz, Hana Omori and Isabel Ramos. They frequently work with many collaborators. Through moving-image, new media installation, virtual/augmented reality and gamified performance they test-drive impending futures in the realms of the ‘phygital’ (physical and digital). Recent projects include Feel My Metaverse, Frankfurt Kunstverein ‘How to Make a Paradise’ (2020), Feel My Metaverse with gamified performance Behind this Screen I am on the Real Earth for transmediale at HKW, Berlin (2020), Feel(s) 360 for Image Behaviour at ICA, London (2019) and Feel My Metaverse alongside long term collaborator George Jasper Stone for Jerwood Art's Collaborate!, London (2019). Keiken have shown work at IMPAKT Festival, Utrecht; LUX Moving Image; Space Art + Technology, London; MIRA Festival, Barcelona; and Tate St Ives. ×
Jonas Pequeno

Jonas Pequeno's work spans a variety of disciplines, including installation, painting and performance. Using sound as a principle medium for experimentation and development, Pequeno engages with ideas of ‘experience as truth’, ’the flux of time’, and ’the location of the event’. He attempts to suspend moments by creating immersive works and engaging in the ’spectacle’, attempting to be ‘violent’ to the event by disrupting spaces, permissible by sound’s intangible materiality. Graduating from BA Fine Art at Central St. Martins in 2019, Pequeno is now an Associate Studio Holder at ACME studios, undertaking a 2 year residency. Pequeno has recently exhibited at South London Gallery, London; Leeds Art Gallery, Leeds; Tate Modern, London; British Museum, London and Cob Gallery, London (solo).×
Bill Leslie

Bill Leslie is a visual artist based in Brighton. His work deploys various modes and styles of presentation and juxtaposition, drawing on diverse references including Modern abstract sculpture, 1950s B-Movies, as well as Russian Constructivism and modern architecture. Concerned primarily with the relationship of sculpture and the photographic image, his works develop through transformations of scale, context and media.

He studied theatre, before turning to sculpture, film and photography, and receiving an MA in Visual Performance and Time-Based Media at Dartington College of Art. He has shown work in the UK and Germany.

He has recently begun working in collaboration with Lucy Cran under the neame LEAP THEN LOOK running workshops and participatory projects for people of all ages and abilities.

www.leapthenlook.org.uk ×
Daria Blum

Daria Blum works across performance, music, video, and installation. She utilizes banal objects as well as grandiose methods of staging to thematize conflicts in self-representation, the optimism of artistic production, and the awkwardness of performance, particularly in the use of the female body. After graduating with a BA in Fine Art from Central Saint Martins, she currently studies on the postgraduate programme at the Royal Academy Schools. Blum recently exhibited at MAXXI Museum, Rome; Latvian National Museum of Art, Riga; Youkobo Art Space, Tokyo; Il Colorificio, Milano (solo); Kunstmuseum Luzern; Annka Kultys Gallery and Somerset House, London.×
Robert Cevera

Robert Cervera is a London-based artist born in Barcelona. He graduated from the Royal College of Art with an MA in Sculpture, and won the 2014 Kenneth Armitage Young Sculptor Prize for his degree show.  Robert's work includes sculpture, installation, video and sound, with a strong interest in materiality and our relation to it.

He has shown in the UK, Denmark, Netherlands, Switzerland, Spain, Portugal and Mexico.
Selected exhibitions include Yes And, Kelder Projects (London); Tomorrow Starts Here, La hiEscocesa (Barcelona); Identify your limitations, Vitrine (Basel); Cue Collision, House of Egorn (London); Salon Acme, Zona Maco (México); Outpost Film Open, selected by Ed Atkins (Norwich); Ichor, Danielle Arnaud (London); and Charlottenborg Spring Exhibition, Kunsthall Charlottenborg (Copenhagen). ×