The grandiose complex of the Venaria Reale in Turin, which this year celebrates 15 years of opening to the public, dedicates the annual exhibition schedule to the theme of the game in all its forms. Guido Curto, director of the Consortium of Savoy Royal Residences, explained to us that “we started with Green, this year is Play, the next will be Food: the idea of these paths is bring the Palace back to its original form of openness and conviviality and give moments of lightheartedness “.
With this in mind, from 22 July 2022 to 15 January 2023, it will be set up in the Sala delle Arti of the Reggia the interactive exhibition Play: Videogames, art and beyond, curated by Fabio Viola, teacher and founder of the international artistic collective TuoMuseo, and by Curto, with the installation of the architect Diego Giachello of the Officina delle Idee: “We have opened the doors of the Reggia to the video game because we want to strike the interest of our audience. We want a large audience, pop in the highest sense, that is, really popular. I have two children aged 11 and 14 who have experienced two years of lockdown locked in the house, psychologically helped by video games, because they shared the experience with their cousins in Brazil and with friends. The video game was a time of great socialization. I watched these video games and I saw a very strong aesthetic impact and I thought it was right to document what we could call the videogame era, ”Curto told us.
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The contemporaneity of the video game will welcome the public in a dialogue between art and technology that develops in 12 thematic roomsViola explained to us: “The exhibition was born with the intention of visualizing the videogame as a lens through which to observe the changes taking place in society. Each exhibition space is a perspective. There is the perspective in which video games and game designers have been inspired by others 9 art form consolidate. On the other hand we find the opposite, that is, how some contemporary artists have been influenced by the videogame language. Rooms dedicated to video games as an identity space, as a political space. There is a space dedicated to the medium as a story, literature, as contemporary mythology, one as a productive and creative center. Each room has the task of showing the public how this medium has come out of a perimeter to become a lens to understand what surrounds us “.
Play: Videogames, art and beyond makes great artists talk to great game designers, Viola told us again: “After an initial phase of research, in which we identified artists and game designers who said they were influenced, we visualized a grid that turned out to be wider than what I imagined. Within this grid we have identified the achievable combinations between the manufacturer of the video game and the loan counterpart of the traditional works. We have due de Chirico in dialogue with Icovideo game by Fumito Ueda; two Kandinsky in dialogue with Rez e Rez Infinite, video games by Tetsuya Mizuguchi; Calder in connection with the game Gris; the Hokusai Wave that dialogues with the video game Eyes. We also show Piranesi’s work paired with both The Bridgevideo game made by Ty Taylor and Mario Castañeda, both with Monument Valley. These are some examples of an itinerary contained in two rooms “.
Ma a Play there are not only great game designers who were inspired by the works of great artists: the convergence between the static image, moving image and interactive image is at the center of the PlayArt space that leads the visitor to relate to contemporary artists such as Bill Viola, Banksy, Invaders, Cao Fai, Jago, Tabor Robak, the AES + F collective and Federico Clapis, who have drawn on the language of the video game to give life to some of their material and digital works.
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Observing these bonds, these complex interconnections, we can ask ourselves if the video game is a form of artistic expression, as Curto pointed out: “I was born as an art historian, a subject that I have taught for years, and I can say that the video game is a very strong form of artistic expression. I carried out a hidden analysis, having graduated with Gianni Carlo Sciolla. There is the concept of attribution, that is, understanding who the authors of the video game are, which kids often don’t even know. Therefore, the idea is to attribute an authorship, which in Play results in the room dedicated to the masters“. Again: “There is the iconographic, iconological aspect, there is a story, a narration. Then there is the purovisibilist analysis, the aesthetic aspect. I see hyper-realistic games, but also works that go towards abstraction and pop and move beyond, touching the surreal. Then there is the aspect of the social history of art, that is, understanding who we are addressing, who the clients are. Behind the video game there is a business, but there is also the relationship between those who create the message, those who commission it and those who use it. We also have the semiological aspect, and finally the psychological and psychoanalytic aspect ”.
In short: in Play: Videogames, art and beyond, video games are revealed in their forms and told with their language. And they become a lens to analyze our reality.