New Game

Full description

Background
This artistic research explores ‘transgressive conceptualism’ as a way to subvert techno determinist conventions. Critiquing the gamification of everyday life, it draws upon feminist theorist Sarah Ahmed (2016) who declares: ‘the more incentives for figuring out how to hack it will proliferate’. It responds to artist Rosa Menkman (2014) who asks ‘what happens when we choose an unreasonable benchmark? What can we expect from these deranged logics?’

Contribution
‘New Game’ is digital video environment created with a 3D engine to enable real-time interaction through a Human Interface Device/gamepad. Visual outputs are programmed to be unpredictable and glitchy. The work applied ‘Meteor Mediums’ which are 9 colour swatches developed by artist Anne Mestitiz in collaboration with TasPaints. In the game environment, ‘unruly’ colour strips broker an aesthetic relationship with the audience who experiences velocities, continuities and contiguities as ‘inscriptive sedimentations.’ The work steps beyond the niche of the gamer into the gallery to perform the role of a capricious device. The audience is a non-player who concedes agency to digital environment. The work proposes the notion of radical subjectivity, akin to Deleuze’s (1983) notion of embodied visibilités where cues are productive of ‘new assemblages.’

Significance
The work was selected to be shown at the juried exhibition at International Symposium on Electronic Art (ISEA) in Hong Kong – a world-renowned electronic art symposium.