Exhibition: SAT 20TH JANUARY – SAT 3RD FEBRUARY, WED – SAT, 12 – 6PM
Opening: FRI 19TH JANUARY, 6.30PM
The Chamber of Pop Culture presents a new group show featuring artists Eleanor Wang, India Nielsen and Jade Ching-yuk Ng. This will be the second instalment in a three part series of collaborations between the three artists.
Growing up with Pokémon and alongside the Internet, our generation’s experience of the world has become paradoxically much more local. Despite having different cultural backgrounds, we all have a shared consciousness through the mediated games we would play growing up.
Play is a process through which children make sense of the world around them; by turning real world experiences into ritualistic practices. When we play we are in a constant dialogue with ourselves and / or with others. What happens, then, when the dialogue of play is with a computer screen? If the ritualised translations of our real world are being carried out through the pre-mediated, pre- programmed world of DOOM or Pokémon?
Rather than being creative agents of a collective world (along with our playmates) – designed to help us process and alter the world around us – we become guests in yet another ready-made world. Our actions within these worlds are prescribed and only possible within the coded borders of the programmed game. Even our sense of play has become choreographed; synchronised.
To genuinely play, therefore, is to take on the role of the hacker. Crash Gods of the Unicurse II explores some of the questions that arise when we try to hack the outer limits of mediated play. Each exhibiting artist creates a unified world within their work. This becomes an island or a home ‘base’ from which they can attempt to interact with and mold the world around them. The real world becomes plastic, malleable, codable – a substance to play with.