Beggars Belief: Background
On Sunday, June 19 at 5pm I’ll release a demo of my next project. You’ll be able to find it here, or by following my or the project’s twitter accounts. What follows is a brief history of the project development, and a rough outline of the ideas it contains. More practical questions about the project are answered in an accompanying FAQ.
Beggars Belief is an ongoing series of artworks wrapped inside short, interactive fictions.
The artworks are real; the worlds they exist in are fictional. Unless you’d prefer to think of it the other way around. That works, too.
The project is about the ways in which the distinctions between “real” and “virtual” break down. It is about the ways that, in that breakdown, social capital and “real” capital become interchangeable. Finally, this project is about the ways that “gamification” accelerates these breakdowns and interchanges.
This first draft of this project was created in late 2019. I was preparing an exhibition of physical sculptures for an upcoming show at my gallery in Toronto. The exhibition was to be titled “SPORTS.” It was a series of sculptures about sports, or popular games, as metaphors for social and economic systems. The sculptures were metaphors for a post-derivative capitalist world, wherein the content that passed through economic systems needn’t have any inherent value, and the system itself could be rigged without consequence, so long as that rigging was consistent enough to facilitate a derivative economy built on top of it.
I created sketches and maquettes of the yet-to-be-fabricated sculptures. They looked like this:
And like this:
When the pandemic hit, I scrapped fabrication plans and cancelled the exhibition. As galleries and museums “pivoted” to terrible online exhibitions, a thought occurred to me: artworks that look like games should be presented inside an exhibition that feels like a video game. Content, meet form.
I took a month in the middle of 2020 to learn some rudimentary skills in Unity, and quickly whipped up a demo to present to galleries and museums.
The demo looked like this:
Unsurprisingly, no gallery or museum (that would speak to me) was interested in formally presenting an exhibition of digital artworks which could only be accessed through a video game. I made plans to withdraw from gallery art altogether, and told my gallerist as much before our relationship came to an end.
Then… the NFT boom ushered in a broader acceptance of digital experiences as legitimate artworks. It also expanded the ways in which we create and disseminate artistic value. The open secret of NFT culture is that a lot of the “artistic value” of NFTs is manufactured in Web2: in the Discord servers, Twitter threads, and blog posts where we mythologize, explain, and curate these artworks into something approximating “art discourse.” This wasn’t always a good thing, but it made me realize that if these narratives could be so easily manipulated, they could also be crafted.
As I watched this rapid (usually artificial, dubious, and disingenuous; but sometimes actually helpful and fun!) manufacturing of context around digital artworks, I recognized new possibilities for artworks set inside virtual worlds of the artist’s own design. I realized that the idea to set my exhibition inside a video game was more than a trick of synchronizing the practical medium and metaphorical content of the work. It was also an opportunity to acknowledge, and then take control over a layer of metatext that the artwork eventually absorbs.
I once heard the technique of the Argentinian writer Jorge Luis Borges described thusly: he’d have an idea for a 700-page novel, but rather than write the novel, he’d find it more interesting to write a short story about a world where that novel already existed.
I’m paraphrasing there (I could never find that exact quote after I heard it), but the approach has always seemed completely rational to me. I think of an artwork as a focal point — a big gravitational phenomenon — around which a whole system of history, cultural references, artistic lineage, and (fine, I’ll use the word) sensibility is called into orbit. The artwork can’t be removed from the system orbiting around it: those satellites of context provide it with most of its power. So in effect, the artwork is the whole system.
Taking this view, it makes perfect sense to build an artwork from the outside in: that is, to craft the system revolving around the artwork with the same care as one would invest in crafting the artwork itself. I originally studied as an architect, and then most of my career creating public artworks. In those fields, artwork and site are inextricably linked. For most of my creative life, I’ve created works that respond to their context. Now in the digital realm, I can create contexts that respond to my art.
What I’m presenting in the Beggar’s Belief demo is not so much the artwork proper, but an example of one framework I’ll be using to present artwork in the future. Upon the release of the demo, I’ll also post an FAQ that answers some of the more practical questions around this framework. Until then… LFG.
