VRAL is currently showcasing Chris Kerich’s latest project Three Impossible Worlds. To accompany the exhibition, we are discussing several artworks that comprise his oeuvre. Today, we examine his conceptual mod GamePyg’s Face and Body Overhaul.
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Produced in 2021, GamePyg’s Face and Body Overhaul is a conceptual art project by Kerich that employs fictional mod listings and images to critically explore the entitlement, attitude, and control manifest in video game modding cultures. It represents both a continuation of and departure from Kerich’s previous game-based art.
Like earlier works, GamePyg interrogates the ideologies and assumptions embedded in gaming environments. Here the focus falls on modding communities and the gendered politics of editing female bodies and sexuality in games like The Witcher 3. Kerich fabricates an extreme future scenario involving AI-generated mod content to unpack player entitlement and anxieties around control.
However, unlike more abrasive works like Piles, GamePyg adopts an oblique, indirect approach using fictional texts and images. The project was initially posted on the popular modding site Nexus Mods posing as a real mod to engage that community. This can be seen as a more subtle, injection-based artistic intervention into a specific subculture compared to Kerich’s more disruptive previous pieces.
Certain themes carry over from earlier projects. For example, GamePyg continues Kerich’s interest in making visible the hidden values and meaning-making systems encoded in games, which is a stated goal of works like Three Impossible Worlds as well as Dynamic Kinetic Sculptures. The fictional mod explores how modding extends player assumptions about control, “ownership” and access to predominantly female bodies. And it makes use of fictional scenarios and imagery to probe the implications of emerging technologies like AI on gaming and gender representation.
At the same time, GamePyg distinguishes itself by targeting a specific sub-culture rather than gaming writ large…
Matteo Bittanti
Works cited
Chris Kerich
GamePyg’s Face and Body Overhaul, mod, 2021
The mod can be downloaded from this URL
A full documentation of the project and the development process is available here
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