A major video games exhibition opens next week - and it's very different
"Videogames: Design/Play/Disrupt", which opens at London's V&A museum next Saturday, 8th September, is not the first exhibition dedicated to games by an august institution of art and design. Many reading this might remember "Game On", an exhibition staged by the Barbican in 2002 (and touring ever since, more or less) which featured such precious artifacts as the PDP-10 mainframe used to play Spacewar! in 1962 and an original Tempest arcade cabinet, almost all of it playable. It was an authoritative and tactile walk through video game history that couldn't help but electrify an existing love of the medium.
Marie Coulston, curator of the V&A exhibition, remembers Game On too, and she wants to build on it, not replicate it. "We thought that the field of video game design and culture is too too vast to look at the entirety of it, and so we decided instead to look at a different angle and that angle was the contemporary," she told me at a launch event for the exhibition back in April. It's not what people expect from the V&A's first engagement with video games. "That is literally the first question that I get from most people: 'Oh, is it a retrospective, is Pac-Man there?' And I'm like, 'I'm very sorry, no he's not.'"
Instead, you'll find The Last of Us, Minecraft, Journey, No Man's Sky, Splatoon, League of Legends, Overwatch, plus many more off-the-wall inclusions in a collection that doesn't go any further back than the mid-2000s. And though some will be shown in the form of playable code, the exhibit, supported by the Blavatnik Family Foundation, takes a multimedia approach. You'll see original concept art, design notebooks, film and installations, as well as artworks that have inspired video games; and you'll find an exhibition that seeks to represent games as living things that interact with their players, rather than as sacred, immutable objects of design.
Post a Comment