Letsplay by Aleksei Taruts and Sergey Babkin
UEBS is a sandbox video game where the player creates simulations of hypermass battles in generated and customized worlds, the scale of which is limited only by the computing power of the computer.
While exploring the game’s world, Aleksei Taruts and Sergey Babkin equate their presence to the model of existence of units of a simulator of epic events—and at the same time find themselves in a situation of inevitable communication about these very events. In such an environment, communication is recognized by the participants as one of the most sought-after and alienated psychophysical resources of attention economy and platform capitalism today. The gameplay’s diverse properties become the optics for studying various issues, such as the infrastructure of customization, psychophysical experiences, and visualization of the historical and other issues.
Authors
Sergey Babkin
Sergey Babkin (b. 1991) is an art worker, curator and regular writer for aroundart.org. Select recent projects include the Dungeons’n’Stuff (co-curator; Moscow and Moscow Region, 2017 – present time), Space for Art. Festival of Self-Organized Initiatives (MMoMA, 2019, in collaboration with Goethe-Institut Moscow), hahaton Festival of Smiles (together with Natalia Protasenya, “Work More! Rest More!”, Minsk, 2019), Kirill Gatavan. Troubles Broken Apart (Vadim Sidur Museum, 2020). Sergey lives and works in Moscow.
Aleksei Taruts
Aleksei Taruts (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.