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

Social commentary, often tinged with humor, loomed large throughout the biennial. The CD-ROM projection Talk Nice (1999-2000), by Canada's Elizabeth Vander Zaag, stars two trendy teenage girls who prompt visitors to sit at a microphone and chat with them. Only by adopting their lilting, Valley Girl voice inflections can one gain their growing approval and, ultimately, an invitation ("omigod") to join them at a party. In a similar vein, American artist Robert Arnold's video The Morphology of Desire (1999) melds a seemingly endless succession of romance-novel cover illustrations one into the other in a wry meditation on stereotypical male and female allure, as well as the relentless commercialization of coupledom. The seven-member French collective PLEIX contributed two videos satirizing sex, science and marketing: one, an "advertisement" for a do-it-yourself plastic surgery kit for young girls; the other, a quick-cut study of the links between a fictive company's increasing sales of growth hormones for pigs and mounting passions among members of the office staff.

More somber in tone were works like 0.000km Zero Sum Game (2003), Korean artist Kira Kim's installation involving speeded-up videos of exercise classes and thronged city streets, a ramp with no walls or handrails, flashing lights and a bull's-eye on the floor--all evocative of the social pressures from which, in another video clip, the artist is seen to escape by plunging from a rooftop. Jung Dong Am and Jung Moon Ryul, game artists from Korea, created Andy's Dream (2004), a large-scale projection of a genetic engineering dystopia replete with winged, breastlike forms that swarm menacingly around human marksmen. Spain's Jose Carlos Casado was more celebratory of new biological options in his video installation newBody.v01 (2004), which portrays many identical nude, clay-toned male figures (human clones, cyborgs, androids?) dancing, tangling and gesticulating in a live-action version of a Classical frieze. Takuji Kogo (Japan) gave vent to cultural resentment in Audiences (2004), a multipart video installation centering on a split-screen mirror image of a little Japanese girl being embraced by Snow White at Disneyland Tokyo. In one quick, endlessly repeated motion, the Western woman in fairy-tale costume seems to shake the Asian child--an act of menace, "disguised" as beauty and sweetness, that expresses the artist's distrust of globalization.

Most of the event's implicitly political works were antimilitaristic. In Babylon Archive (2003), shown on a row of video monitors, Spain's two-member OVNI Archives (Abu-Ali and retroyou) zeroed in on the nexus between war, commerce and digital "play" by juxtaposing commercial combat games with official interactive training software, featuring bearded adversaries in Middle Eastern settings, used to prepare American infantrymen for street-to-street operations. Meanwhile, Anne-Marie Schleiner, Brody Condon and Joan Leandre, from the U.S., exhibited a modified version of the post-9/11 game Counter Strike in which peace messages were inserted into portrayals of military reprisal. A comparable intervention by Greek-born Miltos Manetas left a single computer-game soldier, bereft of a mission, sitting perpetually on a set of steps and tapping his foot. The ambiguously titled Seoul: Killing Time (2002), by Brazilian artists Angela Detanico, Rafael Lain and Jiri Skala, comprises a model of the city and an altered flight-simulation video that portrays a warplane landing safely and taxiing peaceably through the street of the capital. Eddo Stern, born in Tel Aviv, constructed a model of a medieval castle with a U.S. military training video playing on its unbreached gate, suggesting both a bunker mentality and the futility of current anti-insurgent tactics.