Issue link: https://read.dmtmag.com/i/641424
C A M I L L E H E N R O T @COELOCANTHE WEB APPLICATIONS Using film, sculpture and drawing, Camille Henrot explores, well, pretty much everything. Her 2015 exhibition at Metro Pictures, for instance, tackled dependency—drugs, love, family, technology—by placing 3-D-printed telephones throughout the gallery that featured crisis hotline-like messages on the other end. BROWSING HISTORY At the Venice Biennale in 2013, Henrot showed Grosse Fatigue, a 13-minute video in which the artist's computer desktop is used as a platform to attempt to explain the history of the universe. The visually overwhelming work—meditative, grand and deserving of repeated viewings—earned her the Biennale's Silver Lion award for promising newcomer. WHEN IT CLICKED Henrot asserts that she only uses technology because it has permeated every level of human communication, and rarely addresses it as a subject in her work. Nevertheless, she won the 2014 Nam June Paik Award, an international media art prize. She is preparing a large-scale solo show at Palais de Tokyo set for February 2017. J A S O N R O H R E R @JASONROHRER Like many kids in the 1970s, Ohio native Jason Rohrer grew up playing video games. As he matured, he grew dissatisfied with a genre that did not. "I got to the point in my mid 20s when fewer and fewer games were interesting to me and seemed worth my time," he says. "Games weren't there to catch me anymore, but I never seem to run out of movies, never seem to run out of novels or music." Over the last decade Rohrer has cultivated an open-ended dialogue around video games, rethinking conventions to advance the limits of the field. His video games are literary, cinematic, philosophical. They deal with the mysteries and subtleties and questions of everyday human experiences. Inside a Star-Filled Sky (2011) is a demonstration of the scales of the universe in game mode where each level up is exponential ad infinitum. The titles of seven playable game sketches commissioned by The Escapist magazine in 2008 are also telling: Perfectionism, Idealism, Immortality and Regret, to name four. His third game, released in late 2007 and one of his most well-known, Passage, is a meditation on life and death. Irrespective of the choices a player makes during the five-minute game, the character is born, ages, falls in love, loses hair, grows old and eventually dies. "Passage was one possible stab at how I could make something that expressed and explored complex and nuanced feelings surrounding the passing of life and inevitability of death," says Rohrer. A new exhibition at the Davis Museum at Wellesley College—the first monographic show dedicated to a single video game creator—closely examines Rohrer's oeuvre to date. Organized by Mike Maizels, the Mellon New Media curator, "The Game Worlds of Jason Rohrer" recognizes the video game (and the act of play) as a serious form worthy of investigation. "It's very easy for cultural historians to dismiss the mainstream as uninteresting," says Maizels. "Art historians tend to dismiss things like Grand Theft Auto as mass products and therefore of little intellectual worth, but the magnitude they have is something worth thinking about." Large- scale projections, immersive environments and laptop stations feature 15 of Rohrer's completed games alongside artist's notes, sketches and ephemera. "We're not the first show to put video games in a museum," says Maizels. "But I wanted to do something with the spatial installation possibilities beyond the rhetorical institutional argument. How can you see a video game differently than you can see it at your house?" —Tiffany Lambert #CULTUREDMAG Her exhibition at Metro Pictures tackled dependency by placing 3-D- printed telephones throughout the gallery that featured crisis hotline-like messages on the other end. "Passage was one possible stab at how I could make something that expressed and explored complex and nuanced feelings surrounding the passing of life and inevitability of death." • • COURTESY CAMILLE HENROT, METRO PICTURES NEW YORK; JASON ROHRER, GDC 168 CULTURED Warren B, 2015