Open Systems Broadcasts is a series of interactive live-streams exploring video games in and as contemporary art. Featuring artists, designers, and curators, Broadcasts are hosted via twitch.tv/opensystems and adopt the platform’s presentation formats such as ‘Let’s Play’ and ‘Just Chatting.’ The live and interactive programmes aim to disrupt the formality of traditional artist talks, presentations, and Q&A sessions by incorporating real time comments and questions.
OS1_Open Worlds
Let's Play: Red Redemption by Total Refusal
Mon, 19 Jun 2023
Red Redemption is an online lecture-performance by artist collective Total Refusal, presenting a crash course on Marxism and class analysis through the mass medium of the video game Red Dead Redemption 2, a western-themed action-adventure game set within a large and vivid open world.
Located in the southern USA, the capital city of Red Dead Redemption 2, Saint Denis, is a pastiche of New Orleans at the turn of the 20th century. Against the backdrop of hundreds of non-player characters (NPCs) depicting various social classes — women and men toiling in factories, middle-class men visiting the theater, and the bourgeois leisure class reading in well-tended gardens — a pseudo-marxist city tour of Saint Denis, led by a robot and two German children, reveals the class relations that shape its cityscapes, mirroring physical capitalist realities.
Red Redemption analyses profit and surplus value, capital, and accumulation through the medium of a video game. It offers an insight into the social, economic, and political realities that exist within digital and physical worlds through the collective’s artistic intervention in the video game.
A conversation afterwards is hosted by SAM curator Duncan Bass.
Located in the southern USA, the capital city of Red Dead Redemption 2, Saint Denis, is a pastiche of New Orleans at the turn of the 20th century. Against the backdrop of hundreds of non-player characters (NPCs) depicting various social classes — women and men toiling in factories, middle-class men visiting the theater, and the bourgeois leisure class reading in well-tended gardens — a pseudo-marxist city tour of Saint Denis, led by a robot and two German children, reveals the class relations that shape its cityscapes, mirroring physical capitalist realities.
Red Redemption analyses profit and surplus value, capital, and accumulation through the medium of a video game. It offers an insight into the social, economic, and political realities that exist within digital and physical worlds through the collective’s artistic intervention in the video game.
A conversation afterwards is hosted by SAM curator Duncan Bass.
OS1_Open Worlds
Let’s Play: OuterIslands Online with Johann Yamin
Wed, 15 Mar 2023
OuterIslands Online is a livestreamed digital tour of the Singapore and Malaysia-themed locations in the online game, MapleStory, specifically from its Southeast Asian server.
The South Korean online game MapleStory(2003–present) holds a multitude of worlds within worlds.While its 2D pixel art, time - consuming gameplay, and anime - inspired graphics are now gazed upon with nostalgia, the videogame still embodies realms of role - playing fantasy, digital kinship, and flows of currency — virtual and otherwise — for many millennial youth growing up in the 2000s.Launched in 2005, MapleStory’s Southeast Asian server(known as MapleSEA) features Singapore and Malaysia - themed locations populated by black slime enemies.
Yamin’s exploration of MapleSEA, OuterIslands Online, borrows its name from the shifting meaning of the term Nusantara. Through the question of a “Southeast Asian” online game server that excludes most other Southeast Asian territories, the livestream considers the dissolution of essentialist ideas about Southeast Asia as regional construct. OuterIslands Online complicates static regional boundaries by inhabiting the sticky viscosities of digital worlds as realms for alternate imaginations of place and time.
The South Korean online game MapleStory(2003–present) holds a multitude of worlds within worlds.While its 2D pixel art, time - consuming gameplay, and anime - inspired graphics are now gazed upon with nostalgia, the videogame still embodies realms of role - playing fantasy, digital kinship, and flows of currency — virtual and otherwise — for many millennial youth growing up in the 2000s.Launched in 2005, MapleStory’s Southeast Asian server(known as MapleSEA) features Singapore and Malaysia - themed locations populated by black slime enemies.
Yamin’s exploration of MapleSEA, OuterIslands Online, borrows its name from the shifting meaning of the term Nusantara. Through the question of a “Southeast Asian” online game server that excludes most other Southeast Asian territories, the livestream considers the dissolution of essentialist ideas about Southeast Asia as regional construct. OuterIslands Online complicates static regional boundaries by inhabiting the sticky viscosities of digital worlds as realms for alternate imaginations of place and time.