BOB BICKNELL-KNIGHT

Out Of Bounds
Curated by Bob Bicknell-Knight
Aram Bartholl, Bob Bicknell-Knight, Alice Bucknell, Mario Mu, Rosa-Maria Nuutinen, Everest Pipkin, Amba Sayal-Bennett and Mathew Zefeldt
1st February – 2nd March 2024
SEAGER, Distillery Tower, 2 Mill Lane, London, UK

The first in a four-part exhibition series organised by Bob Bicknell-Knight at SEAGER, titled Matchmaking, exploring how artists make work with and about video games, Character Creator investigates the idea of the avatar, second selves and lives lived online. The exhibition reflects upon how artists use video games as a vehicle for speaking about representation in the digital space, escaping into virtual worlds and finding oneself through the act of play.

Each exhibition in the series is accompanied by a reading list of books that inspired the ideas behind the exhibition, as well as a number of books selected by the exhibiting artists that inform their practice, available to read within the gallery space whilst sitting on a custom-built bench. As the series of shows continue, the separate bookshelves will slowly fill with books, effectively becoming an archive of all four exhibitions.

Out Of Bounds takes its title from the video game term associated with areas within a game world that the player shouldn’t necessarily be able to access, hidden behind tall structures and invisible walls. These zones, usually near the edges of a game map, sometimes enable you to explore and see what might have been, from half finished assets to gameplay testing areas. These hidden regions, ghostly and uninhabited by non-player characters, provide a glimpse into the complex and otherworldly infrastructure of video game worlds.

The works included in Out Of Bounds highlight and comment upon the structures that contribute to the creation of game worlds, architectural aesthetics and virtual landscapes.

The disorientating sculpture de_dust (2004) by Aram Bartholl comments on the aesthetics of virtual environments that were being built in the 1990s by replicating a pixelated wooden crate from the 1999 video game Counter-Strike. Within the game world the original function of the crate, as a packing medium, is abandoned. Instead, the crates that are present in the first-person shooter function as architectural elements within the environment to complicate space and provide much needed cover for players. Engaging with how the video games we play are made, Bob Bicknell-Knight’s Animal Pack Deluxe (Rabbit_Die) (2024) and Mountain Environment (mushroom_scarletina_bolete_03) (2024) explore the role of pre-made assets, specifically prefabs, within game development and our 24/7 lifestyle. Prefabs are simple game objects with low polygon counts used in multiple places across a given game. These prefabs are bought by game developers to make the creation of games easier; a contemporary coping mechanism harnessed to accelerate the production process of virtual experiences.

The first film within the exhibition, Alice Bucknell’s The Alluvials (Chapter 1: California pilled) (2023) is the first part of a multi-chapter film and playable game that explores the politics of drought and water scarcity in a near-future version of Los Angeles. Focusing on the slippery interplay between engineered ecosystems, nonhuman characters, and the natural resource market that together define the future of LA, the story is told across several media, including custom-built game environments, modified versions of the fictional city of Los Santos from the video game Grand Theft Auto 5, 3D scans of the city captured by drone, and Stable Diffusion “hallucinations”, merging historical images of the River with existing proposals for its redevelopment. Created within the video game development software Unity, the second film in the exhibition, Mario Mu’s Sites Of Encounter (2022) deals with the transformation of the labour system, from factory settings to digital platforms. The film follows an intimate dialogue between a group of unknown characters as they navigate contemporary labour conditions in several abandoned architectural environments, from a factory floor to an office block. Questioning the morphology of spaces and objects, the film asks how space, memory and alternative ways of work could be re-mapped.

Reflecting on traditional ways of working, Rosa-Maria Nuutinen’s En Plein Air (Thunderjaw Site) (2024) and En Plein Air (Chasing for Monet) (2024) are reproductions of landscapes within the 2017 video game Horizon Zero Dawn. The works both celebrate and attempt to capture the essence of the landscape by drawing on-site. Nuutinen created the works in front of her computer screen whilst the world of the video game continued to be simulated. The 3D printed elements of the frame reference the icons associated with different enemies within the game world which Nuutinen had to defeat in order to be left alone to draw within the landscape. An unfolding, increasingly reflective, html poem, Soft Corruptor (2021) by Everest Pipkin is accessed via an iPad within the exhibition space, exploring nostalgia, retro video games, out of bounds areas, atomic structures, view source, and ghosts. Interacted with through clicking the html tag, the work is about surfaces and interiors in both subject and form.

Made from a variety of industrial materials, Amba Sayal-Bennett’s Ferro (2023) explores ideas surrounding processes of abstraction, sci-fi aesthetics and map making. Other works in the show by Sayal-Bennett, Syzygy (2023) and Softscape (2023), are drawings presented within 3D printed frames. Produced using Computer-aided design (CAD) software, the works abstract and evolve real-world architectures, creating fictional elements and imagery that hint towards the essential architecture of our material world. The final work within the exhibition brings us back to how video games are created, highlighting the artistry behind the games we play. Mathew Zefeldt’s Surface Texture I (2023) is a meticulously painted reproduction of the ground within the 2013 video game Grand Theft Auto V. The painting, part of an ongoing body of work documenting Zefeldt’s escapades within the game world, seems to be reflecting on this perfectly imperfect array of rocks. Created by one of thousands of developers that work for Rockstar Games (the publisher behind the GTA series), this surface texture, which will have been repeated throughout various areas within the game world, is the embodiment of how exhaustive and extensively detailed games have become in a bid to replicate and improve upon the physical world around us.

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Reading List:

– A History of Pictures: From the Cave to the Computer Screen by Martin Gayford and David Hockney, 2016 (recommend by Mathew Zefeldt)

– Never Alone: Video Games as Interactive Design by Anna Burckhardt, Paola Antonelli, and Paul Galloway, 2022 (recommend by Bob Bicknell-Knight)

– An Attempt At Exhausting a Place in GTA Online by Jamie Sutcliffe and Michael Crowe, 2017 (recommend by Bob Bicknell-Knight)

– Gamescenes: Art in the Age of Videogames by Matteo Bittanti and Domenico Quaranta, 2006 (recommend by Aram Bartholl)

– Tomorrow, and Tomorrow, and Tomorrow by Gabrielle Zevin, 2022 (recommend by Bob Bicknell-Knight)

– Playing Nature: Ecology in Video Games by Alenda Y. Chang, 2019 (recommend by Alice Bucknell)

– Atmospheres: Architectural Environments. Surrounding Objects by Peter Zumthor, 2006 (recommend by Mario Mu)

– HR Giger. 40th Ed by Andreas J. Hirsch, 2021 (recommend by Rosa-Maria Nuutinen)

– The World Is Born From Zero by Cameron Kunzelman, 2022 (recommend by Everest Pipkin)

– A Thousand Machines by Gerald Raunig, 2010 (recommend by Amba Sayal-Bennett)