Explore a free exhibition dedicated to showcasing games created by digital artists and independent video game developers.
From 5 September 2024 - 27 April 2025, we’re transforming our first-floor gallery into a space for games created by digital artists and independent video game developers.
Fun, playful and suitable for gamers and non-gamers of all ages, Art Plays Games looks at how artists are increasingly using games as a way to challenge conventional forms of storytelling and offer us new ways to make sense of the world today. Over the exhibition’s run, the artworks and games on display will rotate, introducing something different to discover each time you visit!
Exhibition Schedule
5 September - 20 October 2024: Rachel MacLean, Youngju Kim, Angela Washko, Sahej Rahal.
29 October 2024 - 5 January 2025: Tomo Kihara and Playfool, Porpentine Charity Heartscape, Laura Palavecino, and Ayoung Kim.
14 January - 2 March 2025: Ada Eden, Danielle Brathwaite-Shirley, David OReilly, and Jiabao Li.
10 March - 27 April 2025: More information coming soon.
The gallery is closed in between rotations.
Each collection of games invites you to play with some of the most pressing questions we face today: how might game worlds offer us new ways of thinking about whose stories are told and how they are represented? Can we see the world through non-human perspectives or think about the issues of climate change and ecology differently? How will our understanding of being human change as artificial intelligence and machine learning technologies become more dominant?
We’ll also host a number of free and affordable events within the space, such as talks, workshops, and tournaments that explore questions around worldbuilding, gamification, and screen culture.
Ada Eden
1001 Nights (2024)
Inspired by Persian folklore, Ada Eden’s game 1001 Nights reinvents the ancient tales of One Thousand and One Nights using AI and audience interaction. Together, players and AI co-create new, unique stories in a back-and-forth dialogue that surpass usual authorial constraints. By combining folklore and contemporary technology, 1001 Nights is a playful testament to the power of storytelling and invites players to consider how it might continue to evolve.
Danielle Brathwaite-Shirley
I CAN'T FOLLOW YOU ANYMORE (2024)
I CAN’T FOLLOW YOU ANYMORE is a browser-based game that incorporates the glitchy aesthetics of video games from the early 2000s with vampire mythology and an interrogation of authority. Using gameplay and storytelling, Danielle centres Black trans identity to consider our complicated relationship to ideologies, people in positions of influence, and the consequences that come with following them blindly.
David OReilly
Mountain (2014)
Mountain is a real-time nature simulation game. After giving players a series of prompts described by the artist as “more psychologically invasive than anything Facebook wants to know about you”, a mountain is generated based on the answers. David’s meditative work brings players face-to-face with the arbitrary nature of the universe and our position within it, provoking us to question how much control we have over our own existence.
Jiabao Li
Nocturnal Fugue (2024) + EchoVision (2024)
Jiabao Li's works bring us closer to knowing and experiencing the world as bats do. Nocturnal Fugue uses bat vocalisations, such as social calls and mating rituals and transforms them into music. EchoVision simulates echolocation in custom-designed, bat-shaped headsets. Inspired by Thomas Nagel's philosophical inquiry in What Is it Like to Be a Bat?, Jiabao’s project attempts to go beyond our limited and subjective human experience.
Header image: Photography by Kieran Irvine
outdraw.AI (2022 - 2024)
outdraw.AI is a game that explores new forms of creativity that resist the technological gaze of artificial intelligence.
almanac of girlswampwar territory (2018)
Created in Bitsy, a web-based game-making tool, almanac of girlswampwar territory (2018) features lo-fi graphics that seek to recreate the feeling that Porpentine experienced when playing video games as a child.
Enchanted Sea (2018-2024)
Enchanted Sea combines music, nature and poetic narrative in this meditative gameplay that encourages us to remember and embrace our fundamental connection to the natural world.
Delivery Dancer’s Sphere (2022) + Delivery Dancer Simulation (2022)
Delivery Dancer’s Sphere and its accompanying game Delivery Dancer Simulation, explore alienation and the gamification of work through the gig economy and platform labour, both of which became accentuated during the pandemic in South Korea.
by Ayoung Kim
Special Event
Game On
FACT
Ready, set, play! Join us for a family-friendly games tournament to challenge yourself and others with classic, indie and artist-made games.
Artists
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