On December 20, the World Gone By Computer Class will close
An open space for online work, meetings of various communities, acquiring practical skills for working in the digital environment, and finding out about artistic and theoretical aspects of the current state of the digital environment and its history.
The World Gone By computer class is located in the space of the Coming World game club, a special section of the eponymous exhibition that took place at Garage in 2019 and explored how the virtual realms of video games and artworks model and study environmental problems, the Anthropocene, alternative life forms, and encounters with the post-apocalypse and dystopias.
For many researchers in Russia today, working with the areas listed above seems a lost opportunity (or one demanding restructuring), at a time when the post-apocalypse and dystopias are being devirtualized and unfolding in real time. Each major catastrophe and traumatic disillusionment and the destruction of the virtual properties of the world make inevitable the reorientation, study, and reassessment of previous efforts and also joint work with trauma and collective responsibility. That is why the place of games (the game club) has turned into a (computer) class: while not excluding games, it also offers other types of interaction.
The class World Gone By will be a space for meetings and cooperation, running lectures, masterclasses, and seminars about the history of computer communities, the creation of and work with digital archives, the development of digital literacy and digital security skills for the art environment, the analysis of the modern media environment, and the production of images using tools of the digital environment, taking into account and critically approaching its militarized genealogy. The computer class will familiarize learners with projects by Garage Digital and the Russian Art Archive Network (RAAN) and with thematic selections of media based on the Museum’s public program. It can also be used as a regular Internet café.
Launcher development: SA lab architectural laboratory
GARAGE DIGITAL PROJECTS
Projects created by artists and researchers within various Garage Digital areas that both use and critique the newest media and help navigate technologized contemporaneity through their imagery and topics.
RAAN PROJECTS
The Garage Archive Collection team has produced reviews of materials kept in the archive dealing with issues of freedom in conversations about art and strategies for reorganizing communities through digital associations.
GAME LIBRARY
Especially for the World Gone By computer class, game designer and video game researcher Dmitry Vesnin has selected works that use nonlinear logics and navigation modes to explore the problems of algorithmic labor and address the history of early games and the sense of nostalgia.
