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"Minecraft" exhibition by Simon Denny
GHOST_xnile, Josh__C and Tatsoni came to the virtual opening of “Mine”.
They jump through the room in the pixelated Lego male look.
Osiris_GHG was on the way, but unfortunately fell from the colliery tower and first has to
respawn
,
i.e. recreate
itself.
The artist is also there, of course.
While his avatar simondenny82 is jumping onto the ceiling lamp in the exhibition room, Simon Denny is sitting in person in front of a laptop in Museum K21 and explaining what is behind his new exhibition - which can be visited in Düsseldorf or on the multiplayer server.
“The world is being mined and collected, everywhere.
Sometimes this happens quite obviously when coal, oil or minerals are extracted from the earth, ”says Denny.
The consequences for the planet are known.
Other people mined bitcoins, meaning they earn from cryptocurrency transactions.
Still others collected data, often large tech companies, often going unnoticed.
The consequences for the spied on remain in the dark.
Denny is interested in the principle of extraction, whether from the earth or from the Internet, and its social and ecological consequences.
“These are not singular processes.
There are so many parallels between mining and data theft, ”says the New Zealander.
He conveys his wise considerations in the place where people dig and collect on a daily basis: in “Minecraft”.
In the game with the pixel optics, which has been extremely successful for more than eleven years, players win raw materials (in game jargon: “mining”) and use them to create new environments (“crafting”).
Due to its versatility, the game has become a cultural phenomenon in itself.
Whole cities have already been reproduced in great detail in “Minecraft”.
“The logic of 'Minecraft', however, legitimizes the thinking that the world's resources are available, everyone can use them and do whatever they want with them,” says Denny - his art is also about this rampant capitalism.
Caught in the cage of exploitation
The playing visitor ends up in "Minecraft" in front of a coarse-grained copy of the Zeche Zollverein in Essen - once one of the largest coal mines in the world, today the exhibition venue and headquarters of the Folkwang University of the Arts.
For “Minecraft” beginners, finding the exhibition is not that easy.
You have to figure out how to move a cart to get into the mine.
Or they plop down into a deep shaft and lose a few hearts of life before they reach the basement with art.
The game, it distracts from the art we are looking for.
Finally, at the center is a symbol of the criticism of capitalism: Amazon's
Worker Cage
.
In 2016, the online retailer registered a patent for a human cage with a robotic arm.
It was intended to protect employees in Amazon warehouses from robots rushing around.
The working person would be locked between machines like in a diving cage between sharks - a creepy idea that, after much criticism, was never implemented.
Simon Denny recreated this cage with the 3D printer.
In “Minecraft”, however, he only hints at it and thus points back to the value of the analog.
Only there you can see the cage in all its details, including its virtual extension: the avatar of a thorn bird in the cage can be recognized with an app.
He recalls that miners used to take canaries with them into the tunnels as a warning system - when the animals were passed out, the concentration of toxic gases was in the critical range.
“This work leads to strange situations: When many people are looking at my work at the same time, the twittering of birds fills the room, while everyone is standing in front of an empty cage and staring at their phones,” says Denny.
"Games change perception"
The exploitation of humans and nature is at a critical level - there is no need to drill deep for this simple message from “Mine”.
But Denny also imagines how it could go on.
Huge cardboard sculptures of mining machines are placed on a game board that stretches across the floor.
Similarly, the head-high installations are certainly more impressive than online, where the user's graphics card determines whether subtleties can be recognized at all.
On the walls, flat screens show videos about surveillance mechanisms for the automated mining of the future.
Denny used drawings to devise long overdue court cases against monopolists, exploiters and climate sinners.
The fact that Denny translated this exhibition into “Minecraft” is not only due to the content parallels between the game and its topic of extraction.
The professor at the Hamburg University of Fine Arts has long been exploring the connection between art and games.
Instead of a catalog for “Mine”, Denny developed a board game together with the artist Boaz Levin.
“Extractor” is based on the trading game “Squatter”, which was extremely popular in Australia a few decades ago - but instead of raising sheep, the player collects blocks of data, turns them into money and collects his resources in a cloud.
Board and computer games can look like good art, Denny thinks.
“They change perception.
Games can make processes visible, but they can also make the ideologies behind them understandable. "
Exhibition
: “Simon Denny.
Mine ”, K21 Kunstsammlung Nordrhein-Westfalen Düsseldorf, until January 17, 2021, in“ Minecraft ”with the latest Java version at the server address mine-simon-denny.apexmc.co
Icon: The mirror