Next Level - Art, Games and Reality

This exhibition at the Stedelijk happened so long ago that I can't believe I haven't blogged it already. The standout pieces in the show were Brody Condon's Karma Physics pieces, which use the algorithms designed to simulate post-mortem judders and twitches in immersive shooter games to create a floating landscape of jerking Elvises.

Now, as a man in my thirties, my experience of computer games is limited. I opted out of gaming before the advent of the playstation, and to be honest, I haven't spent much time at all shooting aliens in the last 5 years. I was therefore quite surprised at the visual beauty and (dare I say it) poetry of some of the standard-issue computer games that were on display as part of the show. In particular, I was struck by one game which enabled you to ride a horse across an open plain, with some massive ancient architecture looming. (James tried to tell me what this game was called, but I didn't really listen properly.)

As an exhibition, I'm not sure it was brilliantly curated. Including commercially available games in the exhibition was a necessary but awkward step. While I was grateful for the induction to contemporary gaming that it offered, I would have preferred to have had a clearer idea of which of the exhibits were the work of artists and which the work of commercial games designers. The message received was that the two were indistinguishable (or interchangeable) when in truth the artist's games are often made as responses to or critiques of the commercially available titles.