Curated by Conrad Bodman and Lucien King
Strange but true: The Barbican Centre, embedded in a concrete bastion that these days seems like London’s Stonehenge, is twenty years younger than the first computer game. “Game On,” organized by the resident curator Conrad Bodman and joystick veteran Lucien King, promises an archaeology of electronic gaming, from 1962’s Space War! to the latest Sony PlayStations, with many of the 250 entries up and running for visitors to try out. In addition, a series of digital art commissions by Mark Dean and sound artist Scanner, among others, will probe the ethics and aesthetics of computer gaming; duo Thomson & Craighead’s canny 1999 work Trigger Happy (in which players shoot up snatches of Michel Foucault’s essay ‘What Is an Author?”) is a headliner.
