The main goal of the seminar is to transform gaming practice, which is casually believed to be a nonimportant recreational activity, into a training ground for the production of knowledge and social and cultural studies.
This event is part of the public program of the World Gone By computer class.
Garage Digital stopped working on this project.
Performance Hydrogen City is the new site-specific performance by Digital Object Alliance invites visitors to experience the materiality of a speculative world of the future through the possible embodiment of videogame logics. The performance took place at Hyundai Motorstudio Moscow as part of the joint program by Garage Digital and the online platform Rhizome for the international exhibition World on a Wire.
All Dungeons Will Fall is a digital project by Aleksei Taruts that explores the impact of technologies of instant communication on the production of different types of knowledge, from scientific to irrational. The starting point of the study was the news about the discovery of Noah’s Ark in one of the Russian regions in 2017. The analysis of multiple videos uploaded to YouTube by amateur enthusiasts allows us to trace how these recordings build confidence in viewers that some mountain plateau is indeed the fossilized Noah's Ark or a crypt containing its remains.
Taruts views the formation of this delusion as being close to a mystical model of knowledge production, the rise and spread of such knowledge being boosted by modern-day media and technology. This case can also be considered an example of hyperstition—a speculative phenomenon described by theorists of the Cybernetic Culture Research Unit (CCRU)—which means an idea that embodies itself into reality. As described by CCRU, such clots of faith/knowledge are constructed through mass culture, the discovery and intensification of coincidences, reference to history and legends, and the possibility of time travel.
In this work, the artist moves away from a media video game, while preserving its formal properties. The interactive narrative unfolds in an intuitively familiar virtual environment, which undergoes many changes due to unfamiliar controls, faulty player interaction logic, and a specific dimension of time. The story’s fantastical protagonist—a downloadable 3D-model of a wyvern dragon—travels to the “recognized” Noah’s Ark in the Chechen Republic, while experiencing strange manifestations of a distributed, simultaneous, and remote presence. The time of action stretches and contracts, the camera loses its hero and receives mediated optics, actions within the game lead to unexpected consequences, mythical and hypercontemporary imagery coexist in locations.
The motif of movement in time and space becomes the basis of the artwork, referencing the 1944 deportation of the Chechen and Ingush populations, among other themes. This motif is supported not only by the narrative itself but also by the shift of the viewer’s attention to the materiality of their own presence at the computer, that is, by finding themselves in several environments simultaneously. The boundary of the digital object’s interface is violated, meaning the user becomes included in it. The file of All Dungeons Will Fall is available for passing through only once, after which it launches a countdown timer that activates the geological time of the distant future.
(b. 1984) is a transmedia artist whose practice embraces primarily performative and situational works as well as mixed media installations. The key issue probed by the artist’s research is the problematization of the notions “event”, “presence”, and “testimony” as units of symbolic exchange. Taruts interprets the modes of presence and distance in relation to event, formed by the affects of cultural industry of the late capitalist era. The artist’s scope of interests also includes irrational manifestations invoked by the technologies of instant representation and attention dispersal, as well as the type of memory generated by unstable connections. Aleksei lives and works in Moscow.
