The capricious churn of internet-charged tradition is producing extra foremost characters, apocrypha and relics than we will deal with. Bear in mind when the Canadian musician often known as Grimes — former partner of one of the world’s most powerful men, the tech entrepreneur Elon Musk — introduced a sword to the 2021 Met Gala? The picture of a futurist pop star lugging a medieval blade (constructed from a smelted AR-15, no much less) down the purple carpet summed up the mystifying approach up to date tradition appears to run in all instructions, chasing myths each new and outdated.
Simon Denny, an artist working in Berlin, creates sculptures, installations, movies and prints impressed by the aesthetics of tech firms. In two concurrent exhibits in Manhattan he has seized on omens just like the blade to discover the sociopolitical fallout of the expertise business’s style for medieval lore. In Denny’s telling, goals of wizards and blacksmiths, darkish forests and dank castles form the most recent digital realms.
“Dungeon,” Denny’s fifth present with Petzel Gallery in New York, contains a sort of heaving shrine to Grimes: Puffs from an automated steamer inflate a black “Recreation of Thrones” T-shirt as soon as owned by the star, put in in a Plexiglas case like a swimsuit of armor. The sculpture is plugged into an influence strip that Denny sourced from a liquidation sale at Twitter throughout its Musk-mandated transition to X.
Downtown, “Read Write Own,” Denny’s first present with Dunkunsthalle, an artist-run house within the monetary district, affords latest work from his “Metaverse Panorama” collection alongside sculptures made utilizing whiteboards auctioned off by Twitter after Musk took the reins. The work means that web tradition, and by extension our closely networked society, resembles the fantasy landscapes evoked by Dungeons & Dragons, or “The Lord of the Rings.” Tech-augmented life, in different phrases, will be understood as a large role-playing recreation, during which bodily and digital realms merge, and Musk et al. make the principles. (Denny additionally curated a present group present at Petzel that includes like-minded artists exploring fantasy genres with new media comparable to 3-D printing.)
“Dungeon” contains a new collection of work of top-down views of varied role-playing recreation maps — actually digital prints on canvas, smeared with oil pigment, for a photorealistic but decaying impact. In a rendering of a HeroQuest board, grey, blue and inexperienced bricks simmer within the blocky darkness like a geometrical abstraction. Different work deepen the thought of “dungeon”: One smeary determine eight is the board for a Hannah Montana-branded model of the tabletop recreation Mall Insanity. A beguiling iridescent sample on one other portray could possibly be ranks of columns or cabinets, however the firm title Nvidia within the nook tells you it’s really a graphics card of the kind usually tailored for dealing with cryptocurrency transactions.
Denny’s skeptical view of the tech business in “Dungeon” is a little bit apparent; it deepens upon viewing the present at Dunkunsthalle, the place the “Metaverse Landscapes” depict digital actual property. One easy earth tone map highlights a “waterfront” lot. Others resemble pixelated blueprints of streets and storefronts.
The concept of metaverse “landscapes” performs on the historical past of panorama work, which in Europe traditionally served as boasts about royal possessions, and in the US as commercials for westward growth, providing (false, romantic) footage of virgin wilderness for the taking. By together with the metaverse on this lineage, Denny underlines the awful proven fact that at the moment’s land grabs usually don’t contain precise land. So many individuals are unable to afford an precise home that the thought of investing in a digital plot is a bitter mockery. QR codes on the works’ sides hyperlink to blockchain entries that monitor these weightless parcels’ present homeowners. The visible attraction of the work is second to the heady attraction of proudly owning a portray of another person’s digital property, and that, as Denny appears to level out, this canvas picture is, basically, the extra actual of the 2.
Denny doesn’t push inventive fashion in new instructions a lot as examine the aesthetics of the tech business. A part of his tradeshow-like 2015 exhibition at MoMA PS1 in Queens showcased replicas of objects seized within the spectacular downfall of Kim Dotcom, also called Kim Schmitz, a German Finnish web entrepreneur. Included was an enormous statue of a Predator from the sci-fi action movies. Denny’s earlier present at Petzel, in 2021, handled an Amazon patent for a comically bulbous supply drone.
Viewing these objects within the full gentle of actuality, tech’s aesthetics look a little bit crummy. However the toylike silliness of the longer term shouldn’t make us snort, Denny suggests — it ought to unnerve us.
There’s a sword at Petzel, too: Throughout the room from the T-shirt shrine hangs a reproduction of Anduril, an Elven blade from “The Lord of the Rings,” which Denny customary from resin tinted with espresso. It’s based mostly on the sword owned by Palmer Luckey, the protection contractor and inventor of the Oculus Rift digital actuality headset (he sold the company he founded to Facebook for $2 billion). Luckey as soon as modified a headset — as a joke — with explosives in order that in case your avatar dies in a recreation, you die in real life. He additionally based a protection expertise firm, Anduril Industries. (A number of of his companions in that enterprise got here from the big-data firm Palantir, additionally named for a “Lord of the Rings” treasure.)
{That a} V.R. guru would make very actual army drones and robotic sentries, underneath the model of an imaginary weapon, doesn’t encourage confidence. Neither does the slogan, emblazoned at Petzel on a shadowy UV print depicting certainly one of Anduril’s autonomous fighter jets: “Combat Unfair.”
Is all of it a recreation to those digital pioneers? Do they know the place digital actuality ends and “meatspace” begins? Denny reminds us that the extra networked our lives grow to be, the extra tech’s guidelines bind our fantasies.
Dungeon
By March 30, Petzel Gallery, 35 East 67th Avenue, Manhattan; 212-680-9467, petzel.com.
Learn Write Personal
By March 31, Dunkunsthalle, 64 Fulton Avenue, Decrease Manhattan; 917-382-4744, dunkunsthalle.com.
