Game on: Media_City Seoul 2004, the capital's third electronic-arts biennial, examined the social and psychological implications of today's video saturation and digital gaming

Art in America, May, 2005 by Richard Vine

If one biennial is good, four must be four times better--right? Such seems to be the thinking in Korea lately, where last fall major international art conclaves took place in Gwangju and Busan [see p. 72] and the World Ceramics Biennale is currently in its third installment [through June 19] in Icheon, Yeoju and Gwangju. Sandwiched between these massive events, Media_City Seoul 2004, the capital city's third biennial of video and electronic-based art, made a bid for critical notice with a calculatedly up-to-date theme: "Digital Homo Ludens, Game/Play."

Organized at the Seoul Museum of Art by artistic director Yoon Jin Sup, the show was diminutive in size with only 42 artists and groups, yet designed to generate popular appeal beyond the scale of its modest $1-million budget. The thesis of Dutch historian Johan Huizinga's 1938 book Homo Ludens--that play, a defining human characteristic, is the basis of all culture--was hitched to today's prevailing rage for computer games. Artists were selected by a team of hip international curators: Johan Pijnappel, a Dutch art historian, living in India, who was previously co-curator of the Worldwide Video Festival in Amsterdam; Liz Hughes, a filmmaker and the artistic director of the Australian media-arts organization Experimenta; freelance German curator Hans D. Christ, co-founder of a new-media "platform" called hartware medien kunst verein; and Tilman Baumgaertel, a critic, curator and teacher who divides his time between Berlin and Manila. With only seven Korean participants, the artist mix was decidedly global. Ancillary activities included "Funny Furniture," an exhibition in which "concept" chairs from 23 Korean designers were scattered throughout the museum's common areas, as well as a lecture series, workshops for children, an "artist cafe" where visitors could confer with show participants, and an information center containing printed matter and computer links to 10 media-arts organizations abroad.

Ironically, this populist approach served to highlight the technological shortcomings of much of the work. Korea, home of Samsung and many other high-tech firms, is exceptionally advanced in digital media, its everyday environment saturated with high-speed Internet access, high-definition video imagery, dazzling computer-game options and sci-fi cell phones. In this context, the equipment and formal ideas displayed by artists--who usually work without cutting-edge facilities and huge commercial budgets--tend to come off as rudimentary and quaint. Success, whether with critics or the general public, depends more on esthetic strategy than on hardware or programming skills.

Many artists confined their efforts to the personal and experiential. At one corny extreme, a four-member Australian group led by Stephen Barrass offered ZiZi the Affectionate Couch (2003), a shaggy, sea-slug-shaped vibrating sofa that purrs when stroked or mews for attention if neglected. At the discomforting pole, viewers confronted black-and-white videos showing Marina Abramovic and Ulay, in a 1977 performance, sitting face to face and repeatedly slapping each other, or Korea's Lee Se Jung, in 2001, placing a plastic bag over her head, drawing a face on it and then sucking the entire sack into her mouth. The color video Slow Service (2003), by Australia's Marcus Lyall, found a humorous middle ground in slow-motion studies of people anticipating, then being hit with, great globs of foodstuff--pea soup, mustard, beans, etc.

A few pieces, like the Swiss team Collectif_Fact's video showing parts of a deconstructed cityscape in seemingly random motion, emphasized classic modernist anomie. But many others highlighted the intense, predatory violence that now seems to have displaced old-school fragmentation and drift. China's Feng Mengbo, once known for slide shows rife with family nostalgia, presented a game-based 3D animation in which floating figures, including his own, blast bloodily away at each other in undefined space. Inside Australian artists Stephen Honegger and Anthony Hunt's brown shipping container one found a virtual-reality schema of the museum interior. From a viewpoint behind a pistol, visitors searched the barren galleries and corridors for an intruder. Once found--where else?--inside the depicted container, the stranger was immediately shot dead, with abundant gore.

If Container (2004) directly implicated the viewer in the thrill of slaughter, Shooter (2000-01), by Germany's Beate Geissler and Oliver Sann, shows the deadening effect of such "play" on its adherents. The work's oversized video projections scrutinize the mesmerized, slightly twitching faces of young gamesters as they maneuver, kill and die in the cyber realm of a network combat game.

Indeed, the insidiousness of new media was a subtext in a number of works. The three-person Australian team ENESS placed a hobbyhorse before a video screen showing a bucolic stylized landscape, with the speed and direction of the virtual journey determined by each rider's rate and vector of rocking. Far less anodyne was Cinema in the Woods (2003), Japanese artist Kenji Yanobe's installation composed of a kid-size puppet wearing a yellow anti-radiation suit as he stands--and occasionally dances--on a barrel before a little rough-hewn cabin, wherein video clips of duck-and-cover exercises and towering atomic explosions are constantly screened. The work's antiwar message seems clear and commendable enough, at least to an adult. Much creepier, however, is the subliminal import of Expecting (2003), an interactive video installation by Australia's Van Sowerwine, Isobel Knowles and Liam Fennessy. By squeezing a small teddy bear, viewers cause a semi-realistic cartoon figure, identified in an accompanying text as a lonely eight-year-old named Charlotte, to swell with pregnancy, lie down on the floor of her bedroom and give birth to a small male playmate.