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PIN–UP | UNREAL ARCHITECTURES: ON THE ARCHITECTURE OF GAMESPACE

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Lawrence Lek, Nepenthe Zone, 2021; Video game installation. Commissioned for the 2021 Ljubljana Biennale. Courtesy the artist and Sadie Coles HQ, London. In her 2007 text Gamer Theory, McKenzie Wark made the claim that we are all gamers now: reality has been consumed by “gamespace,” as she termed it, so we can expect pure contest and agony for the rest of our lives. “Games are no longer a pastime, outside or alongside of life,” Wark argues. “They are now the very form of life, and death, and time itself. These games are no joke. When the screen flashes the legend ‘Game Over,’ you are either dead, or defeated, or at best out of quarters.” Updating Gamer Theory for the age of the Metaverse, the totalizing dystopia of gamespace and collapse of the “real” into the digital feels all-consuming, like there’s no way out. So what’s a poor little gamer to do? Seize the means of production, of course, like any good Marxist — in other words, we must game-ify the game. The last decade has seen a c

PIN–UP | UNREAL ARCHITECTURES: ON THE ARCHITECTURE OF GAMESPACE Lawrence Lek, Nepenthe Zone , 2021; Video game installation. Commissioned for the 2021 Ljubljana Biennale. Courtesy the artist and Sadie Coles HQ, London. In her 2007 text Gamer Theory , McKenzie Wark made the claim that we are all gamers now: reality has been consumed by “gamespace,” as she termed it, so we can expect pure contest and agony for the rest of our lives. “Games are no longer a pastime, outside or alongside of life,” Wark argues. “They are now the very form of life, and death, and time itself. These games are no joke.

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