As part of the SUBOTRON arcademy series of lectures on the theory of computer games, Katharina Brandl will speak about performance art in multi-player-games.

Gaming cultures are not only omnipresent, they also invited visual artists since the 1990s to directly engage with screen-based games: by referencing the image-worlds of digital games, by the actual use of game engines for the production of art works or by performances in game spaces. While the interest in art practices invested in gaming cultures seems to fluctuate during the most recent decades, as well as the use of specialized terms like “game art”, performances or interventions in game-spaces did not leave the gallery spaces in the last two decades.

In her talk, she will not talk about games as art, but rather about a specific interest in performance art in screen-based games:
What does it entail to actually qualify, from a position of contemporary art, performative interventions into game spaces, and more specifically in multi-player games spaces, as performance art? What does it mean if an artwork loses its institutional authorization as a work of art, because it is no longer shown in a gallery space but rather on streaming platforms like Twitch? Which notion of performance art is necessary to accommodate art practices that engage with screen-based games? In what ways does a multi-player game space differ for the spaces that performance art usually takes place in?

Registration: subotron.com/veranstaltung/performance-art

Zoom-Meeting: https://us02web.zoom.us/j/89583307527
Password: perform!