Featured will be low-fi game artist Mark Essen, otherwise known as Messhof, who created the starkly experimentalist Flywrench and Randy Balma: Municipal Abortionist - you may remember him from our interview with him earlier this year. Another headliner is video artist Bill Viola, who has worked with partners as diverse as Nine Inch Nails and opera director Peter Sellars and will be contributing The Night Journey. Billed as a ‘slow’ videogame, it uses game technology to present players with choices as they move through a landscape, all to reflect the journey to enlightenment. And Cao Fei, an acclaimed young Chinese artist, will present COSplayers, a video that follows a group of Guangzhou cosplayers (pictured above).
We spoke to curator Heather Corcoran about the exhibition, the state of game-related art and the finer points of presenting games in gallery.
The relationship between art and videogames is increasingly being explored in gallery exhibitions. What are you specifically aiming to present in Space Invaders?
We wanted to do something about videogames and art but yeah, over the past 10 years there's been quite a few exhibitions in that area, so we're trying to move on to look the area in more specific detail. We wanted to look at the videogame environment and the progression of games from the 2D to 3D and beyond that. Under this there are essentially two strands. One is looking at the confusion between real space and game space and the other is looking at screen-based works that are exploring the environment in different kinds of ways.
Are you aiming to reach a broad audience?
Yeah. We're based in the centre of Liverpool so during an eight-week exhibition we'll get approximately 80,000 people through the doors. However, we're also the UK's largest institution for media arts so we have a specific remit in the country to look at new technology in art and have particular audience interest in that area as well. So we'll have a lot of playable games that are family friendly and nod to retro games that people like, but we're aiming in the show to be critical, so anyone with a background in games and art will find something of interest. It's a dual strategy.
Mark Essen's The Thrill Of Combat
Why did you plan to do a show on games at all?
The northwest is a real hotbed of video game development. In Liverpool there's Bizarre Creations and Sony's Studio Liverpool, so it's about recognising Liverpool as an innovator of games. We also had access to some of the big developers here and took some time to talk to them - mostly about the conceptual aspects of putting together a game to get some insight which would help me do my research.
Have you always had a personal interest in videogames?
I've always been a gamer - I grew up with brothers! I actually did an exhibition in Toronto in 2006 about hacking computer games - about people who took apart proprietary consoles, subverted them and did interesting things with them. So I already had a familiarity with artists working in this area.
Did you find your plan for the exhibition changing as your research went on?
I wouldn't say it changed dramatically but it definitely added some elements to it. For example, when I went to Sony we talked about online multiplayer gaming and how it's the future of gaming, and portable gaming, where if you're playing a game on the move it subtly changes your immediate environment.