Wally (Marble), 2023
3D printed PLA plastic, USB drive
6.5 x 11.5 x 8.9 cm
Bob Bicknell-Knight’s Wally (Marble) (2023) is an edition of ten, 32GB USB drives, produced as a series of functional artworks for Giftshop.Global. The sculptures are an extension of Sunday School, a solo exhibition by Bicknell-Knight at Number 1 Main Road in Berlin, Germany, held between 29th April – 21st May 2023.
The exhibition explored loot boxes in video games, how they have transformed and embedded themselves within the video game industry and the gamification of everyday life. The exhibition examined loot boxes, but also Christianity, faith, morality and wealth inequality. Sunday School revolved around Wally, an anthropomorphised loot box from a fictional video game. Throughout the exhibition space were life-size sculptures of Wally posed in various situations, from kneeling to lying down on the floor.
Wally (Marble) is a small-scale version of these larger sculptures. 3D printed with a marble filament, the work references ideas of wealth and commodity. Within video games, loot boxes are valuable virtual items that contain unknown treasures. This characteristicis echoed in USB drives, physical vessels carrying important, mostly unknown, data for individual owners.
Alongside being functional USB drives, each sculpture holds a unique poem produced using ChatGPT, an artificial intelligence chatbot. The chatbot was asked to generate a poem about a loot box called Wally, with the response being regenerated for the ten editions. Each poem is unique, yet all of them have similar characteristics and parallel overarching storylines, mimicking how items hidden within loot boxes in games are, more often than not, almost indistinguishable to items that you already own in your inventory.
BOB BICKNELL-KNIGHT 