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Ocean of Dreams – A landscape of waves, sand, words, and collective imagination

Fri, 16 Oct 2026 15:47:56 +0200

Created for MIT Future Fest 2026, Ocean of Dreams is a public artwork by Behnaz Farahi & MIT Media Lab. It brought 430+ shared hopes to life, projecting handwritten text onto an interactive ocean landscape at MIT Kendall Plaza.

the_local_aura – A neighbourhood’s present, carried by those who cross it

Fri, 16 Oct 2026 13:45:11 +0200

the_local_aura is an interactive installation that turns the act of crossing a place into an encounter with its present by attaching real-time local news to the bodies of the people who walk past it.

Rhizome is Hiring!

Thu, 15 Oct 2026 18:44:00 +0200

As we enter our fourth decade as an essential memory institution for digital art, Rhizome is looking to hire two new full-time roles: a Development Manager and Infrastructure Specialist.

Reporting to the Executive Director, the Development Manager’s primary goal is to ensure meaningful engagement with our supporters and stakeholders, as well as broadening our patron base. This will involve writing proposals and reports, synthesizing input from colleagues, drafting email updates, updating decks, and managing donor and member records. Through this work, the Development Manager will meet people around the world who are shaping culture and society: foundation program officers, collectors and patrons, tech and corporate leaders, community organizations, and artists.

This is a new role, and the only position at Rhizome dedicated entirely to development. As such, it offers the opportunity to make a big impact on the organization’s next chapter.

See the full description for Development Manager & Apply

Rhizome is also hiring an Infrastructure Specialist to run and care for the technical infrastructure behind its preservation work, exhibitions, and day-to-day operations.

The Infrastructure Specialist operates and maintains Rhizome’s storage systems, supports its PeerTube infrastructure, manages the equipment and technical knowledge needed to exhibit born-digital artworks, and administers internal IT, identity, and CRM systems. The role also plans and installs technology for exhibitions and events, offers legacy media migration as a service, supports the Developer on website improvements, and leads hackathons that help Rhizome think creatively about how software can further its mission. It suits someone who learns quickly, enjoys solving practical problems, and is interested in how digital culture is kept alive over time.

See the full description for Infrastructure Specialist & Apply

Room as Instrument – Mathematical patterns in motion

Thu, 15 Oct 2026 14:43:39 +0200

Twelve wooden spheres move in changing patterns inside an illuminated freestanding wall, with music and projected visuals in sync.

Que sait-on du MAM, premier musée d’art médiatique de Rome ?

Thu, 15 Oct 2026 10:48:49 +0200

Niché dans l’ancien cinéma Avila, sur le Corso d’Italia, le Media Art Museum, c'est 1 000 mètres carrés d’art numérique, une salle...

À l'instant •

Écrit par Zoé Terouinard

« Die & Retry », l’art de manipuler selon Angels Front

Wed, 14 Oct 2026 23:48:36 +0200

Ni tout à fait une exposition ou un spectacle, ni tout à fait une télé-réalité ou un jeu vidéo, et encore moins un escape game, l’œuvre...

12 octobre 2026 •

Écrit par Benoit Gaboriaud

Categories of the Art Game

Wed, 14 Oct 2026 16:44:00 +0200

WATCH: Origins of the Art Game, NEW INC DEMO2026, New Museum, June 3, 2026.

Ayoung Kim, Ghost Dancers B, 2022,

Artforum, November 2025 (left) and Frieze, no. 255, November/December 2025 (right), both featuring Ayoung Kim, Ghost Dancers B, 2022. Exhibition view, “Ayoung Kim: Many Worlds Over,” 2025, Hamburger Bahnhof. Courtesy Nationalgalerie—Staatliche Museen zu Berlin. Photo: Jacopo LaForgia.

Lu Yang, LuYang NetiNeti Arcade, 2022. Commissioned and produced by Zabludowicz Collection. Installation view, Zeppelin Museum Friedrichshafen. Photo: Markus Tretter.

Leo Castañeda, Camoflux Recall Grotto, 2026. Installation view, Whitney Biennial 2026. Photo: Ben Davis.

LaTurbo Avedon, Permanent Sunset, 2020-present. Installation view, Centre Pompidou-Metz. Photo: Marc Domage.

Gabriel Massan, Third World: The Bottom Dimension, 2022. Featuring Castiel Vitorino Brasileiro, Novíssimo Edgar, and LYZZA. Image courtesy of artist.

Art games are so hot right now. Look around the art world, and you’ll find an unprecedented number of exhibitions, commissions, and press centered on artists who make games or for whom the game engine is a core tool.

In the past year: the Serpentine released I DIDNT REALISE YOU THOUGHT LIKE THAT (2026), the latest chapter of Danielle Brathwaite-Shirley’s THE DELUSION (2025); Ayoung Kim’s Ghost Dancers B (2022) made the covers of both Artforum’s and Frieze’s November issues; and, in 2027, Hans Ulrich Obrist’s game-centric “Worldbuilding” exhibition arrives in New York at the soon-to-open CANYON. And as we all know, once a particular art form gains popularity and attracts a large number of talented and diverse practitioners, there is one critical thing we must do: define subcategories of that art form.

I’m half-joking. In fact, many writers I admire in this field insist that videogames as a medium don’t need a framework connecting them to historical art practices—that they should simply be allowed to be new. A large part of me agrees. But as an artist, I can’t help but want to map the strategies at play in this vast, unwieldy category. I do this because this process of mapping out the possibilities of a medium helps me understand what’s in my toolbox when I sit down to create my own art. Conversely, creating games myself has helped me to understand the medium’s boundaries through practice, rather than theory. So in this essay, I will walk you through this map I’ve created—a loose, somewhat ridiculous sketch of how I think about the “possibility space” within art games. As I walk you through it, I will also discuss some of the games that I’ve made. This is not so much about discussing my own work, but rather about demonstrating the practical application of my evolving understanding of the art form—an understanding shaped especially by my favorite works from other artists, which will be discussed in more detail here than my own.

Venn diagram, Mitchell F. Chan, 2026.

Walking through this map is a useful exercise for the artist. There is another, snarkier reason this exercise benefits the critic, curator, or general art patron. A disproportionate amount of art-world engagement with games has been built on the thematic framework of “worldbuilding” or “lore.” However, when you lay out all the techniques, affordances, engagement strategies, and conceptual possibilities of art games in one place, you come to realize that this fixation represents a pathetically narrow and incomplete view of the medium. Therefore, the goal of this essay is to widen our field of view—to draw a bigger map of all the different forms of expression already being executed within this art form.

Winslow Homer, Croquet Players, 1865. Oil on canvas, 16 x 26 in. Buffalo AKG Art Museum, Charles Clifton and James G. Forsyth Funds, 1941 (1941:11).

Mitchell F. Chan, Winslow Homer’s Croquet Challenge, 2022. Screenshot courtesy the artist.

Let’s pick the low-hanging fruit first. In 2022, curator Tina Rivers Ryan commissioned the first art game I ever made for the Buffalo AKG Art Museum. Titled Winslow Homer’s Croquet Challenge, it reconstructs Winslow Homer’s 1865 painting Croquet Players, from the museum’s collection, as a fully playable game. Consider a comparative visual exercise: both artworks depict a mixed-gender lawn game in Reconstruction-era America, but only one of them features a fully interactive, meticulously constructed world around that scene. From this, we may conclude, in academic terms, that one of these artworks is not as good as the other. (I’m joking again.)

Winslow Homer's Croquet Challenge (2022), Mitchell F. Chan. Playable embed.

Underneath the joke, however, lies an artist's primary instinct when confronted with a game engine: the impulse to take one art form and place it within another, bigger art form. This is the entry-level art game: put the painting in three-dimensional space. Make it interactive. Make it nonlinear. It’s fun. Suddenly, you get to make the biggest art, the most art—the art that encompasses all other art.

Richard Wagner, The Art-Work of the Future (1849), translated by William Ashton Ellis. Image by Mitchell F. Chan, 2026.

That instinct has a patron saint. More and more artists are drawn to create games for the same reason Wagner wanted to write operas. If you were Wagner and you wanted to be the greatest artist, you would create the Gesamtkunstwerk—the total work of art, integrating music, literature, costume design, performance, and even architecture. Videogames are the contemporary manifestation of such an ambition. Thus, I have a name for the art games that genuinely attempt to expand other art forms inside an interactive format: Gesamtkunstgames. Yes, I know it’s a ridiculous name.

While I’ve called this the “entry-level” art game strategy, its best examples are interactive artworks of stunning depth, intellectual rigor, and beauty. Curiously, the masterpieces of the Gesamtkunstgame come mostly from outside the art world’s usual roster of media artists. This will be a recurring theme.

Oikospiel Book I, created by David Kanaga in 2017, is an interactive opera about a group of computer-programming dogs who have been commissioned to develop an opera based on the satirical novel The Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy, Gentleman for their patron—a caricature of the billionaire industrialist David Koch, named Donkey Koch—but who must first organize a trade union and then grapple with how climate change will affect a delivery date one hundred years in the future. This describes perhaps ten percent of what transpires in this artwork. It’s complicated. Kanaga, a genuinely brilliant composer by trade, has a long history of using game engines to experiment with nonlinear musical composition. Oikospiel Book I also features the most beautiful and haunting remix of Céline Dion’s “My Heart Will Go On” that you’ve ever heard. I’ll bet you never realized you needed that in your life.

Oikospiel Book I (2017), David Kanaga. PLAY AT: https://dkoikos.itch.io/oikospiel

Or Kentucky Route Zero, by Cardboard Computer: a heartbreaking magical-realist novel embedded in a point-and-click adventure game. In it, a delivery truck driver, two androids, and a missing new-media artist enter a secret world hidden in Kentucky’s subterranean caves and eventually reckon with the consequences of crippling debt. Every frame of this game could hang on a wall. The medium its creators—graduates of the School of the Art Institute of Chicago—are most clearly expanding is the novel. Most games use dialogue choices to change outcomes; Kentucky Route Zero uses them to let the player define the characters’ interiority—their motivations, rationalizations, and backstories—while the world moves ahead on rails. Elsewhere in the game, you’ll find a fictional artwork in reference to a Nam June Paik sculpture and a play-within-a-play that uses the player’s nonlinear path to stage a drama and its critical reception simultaneously. I want to be careful with hyperbole here, because I need you to take this literally: Kentucky Route Zero and Oikospiel Book I are two of the greatest artworks made in my lifetime, in any medium.

Kentucky Route Zero (2013–2020), Cardboard Computer. PLAY AT: https://cardboardcomputer.itch.io/kentucky-route-zero

But notice what actually makes them great. It isn’t that they built beautiful worlds, though their worlds are beautifully built. Each is constructed around a core element that demonstrates real mastery of another art form—musical composition in Oikospiel, literary prose in Kentucky Route Zero. Rip that core out and present it alone, and you would still have a great piece of music or a great novel. The interactive layer expands the core. The worldbuilding is additive, not a rationalization for packing lots of content into a single software package.

I want to pause on this, because “worldbuilding” has become the art world’s favorite curatorial hook, and I think the emphasis is misplaced. Worldbuilding on its own—a maximalist 3D tableau filled to the gills with assets the artist made—is not an interesting organizing strategy for an artwork. It’s a teenager’s diary: an interesting artifact, but not an interesting artwork. The desire to be a Shaper of Worlds is one of the most common creative drives there is, and it isn’t even new. Hieronymus Bosch was worldbuilding. Matthew Barney was worldbuilding. Duchamp? That guy loved worldbuilding—the Bride, the Bachelors, the Chocolate Grinder, and Rrose Sélavy are all recurring characters in the Duchamp Extended Universe. Lazy “worldbuilding” art games typically take the form of generic 3D platformers or first-person walking simulators, with relatively little attention paid to gameplay mechanics or player motivation, with most of the energy expended on decorating the environment.

Brandon Sanderson, the best-selling fantasy author, tells his writing students that a fantasy novel is composed of characters, plot, and worldbuilding. He emphasizes that although worldbuilding is the component immature writers most want to spend their time on, it is, in fact, the least important of the three. I would offer similar advice to artists making games, especially as the impact of worldbuilding as gesture is about to become seriously diluted. In January 2026, Google opened Project Genie to paying subscribers: type a sentence, wait a few seconds, and walk around inside it while the model invents the path ahead of you in real time. The worlds are still wobbly and low-res, and your visit ends after sixty seconds, but these models will get better. An immersive world, as a deliverable, is on its way to becoming trivially easy to produce. “Worldslop” is coming. The artists who will matter in this medium are those whose work is organized around something a world-generator cannot emit.

Ian Cheng, Life After BOB: The Chalice Study, 2021. Screenshot by Mitchell F. Chan.

It’s worth taking a moment to address another category of works that get assigned the “worldbuilding” tag and are created with game engines. A number of the artists often bracketed under “art games” are not really making games at all; they’re using game engines to make films. This is a perfectly valid thing to do. Game engines contain the tools of cinema and have become a fast, cheap, and expressive way to produce it. But an artist making a CGI film inside Unreal Engine, like Lu Yang, is working in the lineage of experimental film, not in the lineage of software. My position is that the “medium” of the artwork is whatever medium the viewer receives. For example, a live-action Spider-Man film, a claymation Spider-Man film, and a 3D animated Spider-Man film are all, to me, the same medium. They will induce the viewer into very similar ways of looking; they will deliver their unique aesthetics through very similar techniques: linear narrative, montage, figurative representation, etcetera. If these films were in the tradition of software, or game design, their art would induce a much different, self-directed mode in the viewer. Furthermore, many of those same artists who were using game engines to create cinematic artworks have already pivoted to using generative AI as an even more efficient means to achieve cinematic ambitions. It seems odd to me that these works are so frequently lumped together with interactive software.

Left to right:

Ian Bogost, Persuasive Games: The Expressive Power of Videogames (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2007);

Frank Lantz, The Beauty of Games (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2023);

C. Thi Nguyen, Games: Agency as Art (New York: Oxford University Press, 2020).

So far, I’ve discussed games containing and expanding other art forms. But what else can games do? What has been most exciting for me in creating videogames is the recognition that there are brand-new experiential, philosophical, and aesthetic possibilities that are unique to games—and that we are still discovering them. That a game is a thing with its own affordances, and not just a delivery vehicle for older art forms, is an argument Frank Lantz makes beautifully in his book The Beauty of Games. For the sake of brevity, let me take that as a given, and go straight to the philosopher who names the most exciting of those new affordances: C. Thi Nguyen, of the University of Utah.

A game designer, Nguyen observes, is not working in the medium of pixels and algorithms. They are “working in the medium of human agency.”

Ouverture du Large : l’imaginaire comme moteur

Wed, 14 Oct 2026 15:48:21 +0200

Sur l'île Seguin à Boulogne-Billancourt, un nouveau lieu a récemment émergé, le Large, dont l'exposition inaugurale fait dialoguer des...

À l'instant •

Écrit par Zoé Terouinard

« Labouring Bodies » : le corps féminin face à la machine

Wed, 14 Oct 2026 10:48:36 +0200

Au Musée Tinguely de Bâle, l’exposition Labouring Bodies rassemble 36 œuvres, de Berenice Abbott à Ernestyna Orlowska, pour raconter ce...

À l'instant •

Écrit par Zoé Terouinard

Wed, 14 Oct 2026 10:48:36 +0200

« (Dé)jouer les mondes » : le jeu vidéo en mode résistance

Wed, 14 Oct 2026 06:41:53 +0200

Avec (Dé)jouer les mondes, le Grenier à sel réunit neuf artistes issus de quatre continents autour d’un même médium : le jeu vidéo....

09 octobre 2026 •

Écrit par Benoit Gaboriaud

Capture / Resemble – Simulating Self-Aware Machine Behaviour

Tue, 13 Oct 2026 16:48:32 +0200

Inspired by AI agents, processing and adapting to each unique interaction, Capture / Resemble captures the individual characteristics and facial expressions of the visitor and transforms them into abstract movements.

On fait le point. L’IA peut-elle être utilse aux musées ?

Tue, 13 Oct 2026 12:41:51 +0200

Publié fin septembre, un rapport examine la capacité de l’intelligence artificielle à « humaniser les musées ». Issue d’une rencontre...

À l'instant •

Écrit par Zoé Terouinard

Maintenant Festival : imaginer des futurs désirables

Mon, 12 Oct 2026 18:41:58 +0200

Peut-on fêter son vingt-cinquième anniversaire sans s’accorder ne serait-ce qu’une pensée nostalgique ? Le Maintenant Festival prouve que...

08 octobre 2026 •

Écrit par Maxime Delcourt

NOTUN – Designing for damage in cyclone-prone Bangladesh

Mon, 12 Oct 2026 15:18:52 +0200

NOTUN combines water-flow simulation, wind-responsive bamboo housing, bio-based embankment blocks and mixed-reality assembly into a repairable settlement strategy for coastal Bangladesh.

À la Bourse de Commerce, Barbara Kruger raconte l’histoire des larmes

Mon, 12 Oct 2026 10:48:42 +0200

Noir, blanc, rouge : à la Bourse de Commerce, Barbara Kruger recouvre la rotonde de « The History of Tears », une installation faite de...

À l'instant •

Écrit par Zoé Terouinard

L'art et la science du goût : une conférence de Christophe Lavelle - Ville de Paris

Mon, 12 Oct 2026 00:17:10 +0200

L'art et la science du goût : une conférence de Christophe Lavelle Ville de Paris

Du travail des femmes

Sun, 11 Oct 2026 12:13:46 +0200

L’exposition collective Labouring Bodies du musée Tinguely est consacrée à la relation du corps des femmes aux techniques ou technologies qui n’ont de cesse de façonner nos sociétés contemporaines. Aussi, il est naturel que la commissaire Sandra Beate Reimann se soit penchée sur l’histoire de l’informatique dont le narratif est plutôt masculin bien que depuis quelques années on commence à en reconsidérer la part féminine, allant des employées aux inventrices. Dans la photographie datant de 1958 de l’Américaine Berenice Abbott – dont on sait l’attachement qu’elle portait aux sciences et techniques –, la tâche de la travailleuse consistant à se repérer dans l’enchevêtrement des câbles d’un calculateur IBM apparaît démesurément complexe. La dactylographie avec ses activités répétitives, elle, a souvent été assignée aux femmes. C’est donc une machine à écrire de type Erika que Rebecca Horn met en scène en 1992. Un mécanisme situé au-dessus de la machine permet de l’activer automatiquement à distance avec quatre longues tiges. Avec une telle pièce cinétique, s’agissait-il pour l’artiste allemande d’évoquer l’aliénation des tâches répétitives ou plutôt une forme de libération mécanique des tâches en question ?

Katja Novitskova, Pattern of Activation (Mamaroo nursery, dawn chorus), 2017. Courtesy Kraupa-Tuskany Zeidler. Photographie Pati Grabowicz. © Katja Novitskova.

De son côté, Tabita Rezaire présente son projet numérique Sugar Walls Teardom de 2016 que l’on visionne installés sur une chaise d’accouchement. On pense alors à cette tendance Care de l’art, bien que la séquence, essentiellement en 3D avec des incrustations vidéo, oscille entre le politique et le méditatif. Ici, l’utérus est le point central. L’occasion pour artiste franco-guyano-danoise d’évoquer les pratiques controversées du chirurgien américain J. Marion Sims qui a effectué des expérimentations sans consentement ni anesthésie sur des esclaves afrodescendantes. De la salle de travail à la maternité, il n’y a qu’un pas que l’on franchit avec Katja Novitskova et son installation Pattern of Activation (Mamaroo nursery, dawn chorus) qui mobilise notamment trois berceaux électroniques. L’artiste estonio-néerlandaise a remplacé les nourrissons par des éléments de facture organique. Cela a pour effet d’évoquer une forme de soin qui pourrait nous échapper si notre confiance immodérée pour les biotechnologies venait à surpasser la raison. Littéralement hypnotiques, les mouvements des berceuses illustrent les discours rassurants d’une industrie s’émancipant de toute forme de contrôle.

Enfin, comment envisager la notion de travail sans évoquer l’exploitation et la précarité résultant de la multiplication des plateformes numériques ? Ce dont se charge l’artiste Ernestyna Orlowska, qui vit en Suisse, avec la performance Make Your Body Your Machine, équipée d’un sac isotherme de livraison rembourré sur le dos. L’outil de travail ainsi détourné autorise des mouvements qui participent d’une chorégraphie plutôt drôle alors que le sujet ne l’est pas. L’image de cette création quelque peu “décalée” fait l’identité visuelle de cette exposition qui démontre l’asservissement du corps des femmes par les techniques entre autres technologies.

Article rédigé par Dominique Moulon pour Art Absolument.

Un champignon marin qui dégrade le plastique inspire une œuvre d’art - Pour la Science

Sat, 10 Oct 2026 07:30:02 +0200

Un champignon marin qui dégrade le plastique inspire une œuvre d’art Pour la Science