Lea Porre

The third in a four-part exhibition series exploring how artists make work with and about video games, Respawn investigates violence, war and politics in the digital realm. The exhibition reflects upon how artists use video games and game aesthetics to speak about conflict, from exploring the history of deserters through the lens of digital warfare to confronting misogynistic portrayals of women in games.

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Each exhibition in the series is accompanied by a reading list of books that inspired the ideas behind the exhibition, as well as several books selected by the exhibiting artists that inform their practice, available to read within the gallery space whilst sitting on a custom-built bench. As the series of shows has continued, the separate bookshelves have been slowly filling with books, becoming an archive of the four exhibitions.

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Within game worlds, death is often trivialised. The term respawn is associated with game characters reappearing in the world after being killed. Rather than being an end state, within virtual space it’s common that the only penalisation for dying is repeating part of a level after watching a loading screen. The option to start over, learn from your mistakes and press play again is all too tempting. Death then, like in the physical world, is omnipresent in the digital, and so is the violence associated with it. Simulated violence within video games comes in many forms, from the graphic, over the top style typically seen in military shooters, to the fantastical, psychological or environmental. Through games, death and violence become a common thread, something that game players are constantly aware of and becoming accustomed to.

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What happens when artists, as is the case in Respawn, reflect, pick up, and comment upon how this is affecting society as a wider whole, whilst harnessing the same games and visual language that has proliferated this seismic shift?