By Mayke Blom
2nd-18th November 2007
Zero Gamers Exhibition was held in 2007 by Curators Corrado Morgana, Marc Garrett and Ruth Catlow in a Gallery called HTTP (Now named Furtherfield), London. This webpage is a documentation archiving an Introduction, exhibition statement, lists of artists/works and Catalogue. It is simple and provides apt descriptions of the works involved and the themes explored around gaming worlds, or the position of the ‘Zero Gamer’.
I feel as though this is a great way to document an Exhibition that has taken place, further giving the viewer access to the artists involved, relationships between the works and contributing to a wider event held in London at the time “The London Games Fringe Festival” taking place in 2007. This festival was discontinued as well as the HTTP gallery, making it a cultural-historical document of a temporal space within an urban environment. Many Galleries have limited lifespans, so continuing to give it a presence on the internet this way rather than just a publication seems fitting, especially in context with the themes it explores.
The themes executed by the artists look at ways to intervene with the experience of the gaming process. It places emphasis on pauses, breaks, loading screens and loss of interactivity that interrupt the state of flow experienced when immersed in a gaming environment, allowing users to reflect or refresh their position from the immersive of the game space. The gallery audience has limited or no direct interaction that would usually come from confronting a game-space, and begin to position themselves as spectators of a video game. Artists have recreated and isolated the game space to sit independent of outcome and user-control by either self-automating the gaming process with AI, or changing the gaming space so that the pause becomes dominant to the gameplay.
As I was browsing through this documentation I would have liked to see more footage, imagery, or links from the artist’s work, however as a pause in itself it limited the distractions while getting a better picture of the artist’s work through the text and limited imagery, and extra multimedia references were easily found otherwise. I like how this webpage isolated the exhibition from other events, simply executed with only four tabs to explore.
I think this is a fun and extended dissemination strategy to document exhibition work. The themes explored are clearly communicated and raise interesting questions around artists intervening and evaluating game spaces. It sits within a larger audience, using familiar popular culture game spaces, something that has begun to integrate itself within the everyday.
Ctrl . Art . Del 