Virtual worlds, briefly digital epicentres of user communities and all-consuming lifestyles lived online, tend to burn brightly before disappearing, hosting one last ‘end of the world’ party before the servers are permanently switched off.
The journey since the earliest online games – from Maze, the first 3D first-person game to be created, to PlayStation Home, WorldsChat and Myst Online – is now traced by a new London exhibition. ‘Between Worlds’, which opened this summer to mark the 20th anniversary of Second Life, a rare example of a still-active virtual world, explores these online communities.
Preserving Worlds (still from Season 1, Episode 1: WorldsChat).
‘The exhibition traces the development of early virtual worlds (for example Habitat from 1985) and compares how the premise of alternative worlds, as spaces for virtual communities to flourish, developed into the 2000s, where it became commercialised through platforms such as Second Life, and resurfaces today through both corporate and public promises of metaverses,’ say the exhibition’s curators Sam Mercer and Arieh Frosh. ‘Rather than being nostalgic, the exhibition aims to bring attention to the attitudes and politics that structure these spaces, and the communities that inhabit them.’
The exhibition considers what happens to these now-defunct communities, looking at YouTube videos marking the endings, and web documentary Preserving Worlds, which focuses on how the communities are maintained.
World Endings (still from Club Penguin)
A newly commissioned video game, World Imagining Game, by Glasgow-based creative developers Benjamin Hall and Frances Lingard, is also included in the exhibition, encouraging players to create their own characters, mode of gameplay and to think about how their world will be moderated.
‘We take a critical look at virtual worlds and wanted to think more about what the general public wants from these spaces that we are told are the future, ones that will have an increasing importance in access to services, entertainment, socialising and work,’ Frosh and Mercer add.
‘Some of the questions we are asking are: who designs virtual worlds, and for whom? What are the economic and ecological realities of these spaces? To produce this we worked with Hall and Lingard. We mapped out a game in which the players design a virtual world from its initial creation and imagine its demise: what happens to the users, the content, the cultures that existed there? As you play the game and answer a series of questions, a visual representation of your virtual world emerges. Upon completing the game, your world will be added to an online repository of hundreds of other imagined worlds, with a selection printed and added to the space at the gallery.’
‘Between Worlds’ at The Photographers’ Gallery, London, is open from 23 June – 24 September 2023
thephotographersgallery.org.uk
Preserving Worlds (still from Season 1, Episode 6: Second Life).
Second Life (still), 2023
-
Designer Marta de la Rica’s elegant Madrid studio is full of perfectly-pitched contradictionsThe studio, or ‘the laboratory’ as de la Rica and her team call it, plays with colour, texture and scale in eminently rewarding ways
-
‘Nothing just because it’s beautiful’: Performance artist Marina Abramović on turning her hand to furniture designMarina Abramović has no qualms about describing her segue into design as a ‘domestication’. But, argues the ‘grandmother of performance art’ as she unveils a collection of chairs, something doesn’t have to be provocative to be meaningful
-
A local’s guide to Los Angeles by defiant artist Fawn RogersOregon-born, LA-based artist Fawn Rogers gives us a personal tour of her adopted city as it hosts its sixth edition of Frieze
-
'We need to be constantly reminded of our similarities' – Jonathan Baldock challenges the patriarchal roots of a former Roman temple in LondonThrough use of ceramics and textiles, British artist Jonathan Baldock creates a magical and immersive exhibition at ‘0.1%’ at London's Mithraum Bloomberg Space
-
Discover Rotimi Fani-Kayode's fluid photographs of the queer male body, on show in London‘Rotimi-Fani Kayode: The Studio – Staging Desire’ at Autograph ABP celebrates the work of the Nigerian-born photographer
-
Saatchi Gallery is in full bloom with floral works from Vivienne Westwood, Marimekko, Buccellati and more‘Flowers – Flora in Contemporary Art & Culture’ at Saatchi Gallery, London, explores the relationship between creatives and their floral muses, and spans from fashion and jewellery to tattoos
-
'I want to get into these images and perfume them': Linder's retrospective opens at the Hayward Gallery'Linder: Danger Came Smiling' gathers fifty years of the artist's work at the Hayward Gallery. We meet the punk provocateur ahead of her first retrospective
-
Tasneem Sarkez's heady mix of kitsch, Arabic and Americana hits LondonArtist Tasneem Sarkez draws on an eclectic range of references for her debut solo show, 'White-Knuckle' at Rose Easton
-
‘A call to action for more authentic expressions of working-class life’: a London show reframes working-class BritainLondon exhibition ‘Lives Less Ordinary’, at Two Temple Place, challenges age-old stereotypes
-
‘Dr Tetris’ on the biggest ever iteration of the puzzle in LondonTetris comes to 360-degree, 23,000 sq ft, 16k LED screens in London; Craig McLean speaks to Henk Rogers, the man who’s kept the game alive
-
Never-before-seen Barbara Hepworth works go on show in landmark exhibitionIn ‘Barbara Hepworth: Strings’, various Hepworth sculptures will be exhibited in public for the first time, at Piano Nobile, London
