Chris Kerich

ARTICLE: A CLOSER LOOK AT CHRIS KERICH’S THREE IMPOSSIBLE WORLDS

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 delve deeper into his Minecraft video essay, with a comparative approach.

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The specific nature of Chris Kerich’s Three Impossible Worlds becomes clearer when contrasted with Sjors Rigters’s The Virtual Frontier. Both artworks employ Minecraft to unpack the ideological biases and constraints subtly encoded within the game’s mechanics and procedural systems. Yet despite this shared intent, the two projects mount their critiques through notably distinct creative strategies.

Fundamentally, Kerich and Rigters have a common ambition: to expose and defamiliarize the colonialist, hyper-capitalist ideology that Minecraft insidiously promotes through its gameplay loops of endless accumulation, extraction and technological expansion. The artists are united in interrogating how this blockbuster video game normalizes ecologically reckless values of infinite growth and resource exploitation.

However, Kerich and Rigters diverge in their means of critiquing Minecraft’s embedded ideology. Whereas Rigters adopts a direct, expository approach in his video essay format, Kerich opts for a more oblique and interpretively open-ended tactic with his interactive impossible worlds. This contrast illuminates two viable artistic avenues for laying bare the concealed politics suffusing mainstream games...

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Matteo Bittanti

Works cited

Chris Kerich

Three Impossible Worlds, digital video, color, sound, 11’ 14”, 2022, United States

Sjors Righters

The Virtual Frontier, digital video, color, sound, 3’, 2020, The Netherlands

All images courtesy of the Artists

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ARTICLE: THE ART OF THE SUBVERSIVE MOD

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…

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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

This is a Patreon exclusive content. For full access consider joining our growing community.

ARTICLE: THE GLITCH IS THE VIDEO GAME’S ID

VRAL is currently showcasing Chris Kerich’s latest project Three Impossible Worlds. To accompany the exhibition, we’ll be discussing several artworks that comprise his oeuvre. Today, we examine his twin projects Katamari Dreams and The Midday Channel.

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In twin projects The Midday Channel (2017) and Katamari Dreams (2016), Chris Kerich leverages live memory disassembling software to remix and reimagine two classic PlayStation 2 titles, Persona 4 (Atlus, 2008) and Katamari Damacy (Namco, 2004). Despite using the same core technique on both games, the resulting aesthetic experiences differ markedly, demonstrating how memory hacking can both reveal and recast the intrinsic software and artistic qualities of the source games.

Kerich’s innovative use of an emulator and disassemblers to manipulate games while running represents an emblematic example of game-based contemporary art for several reasons. First, it allows creative intervention into the original games, remixing assets and code to generate novel audiovisual spaces. By altering the game maps, assets, and code while the game runs, Kerich is able to reconfigure the “raw materials” of the original game worlds. This remixing and reimagining of game environments is a signature of artistic game modification.

Second, his process reveals and comments on the underlying software processes that power the games. By directly viewing and editing compiled game code, Kerich provides rare insight into the internal logic governing gameplay – peering “behind the curtain”, in a way that investigates games as software systems, not just entertainment experiences. This interrogative uncovering of obscured technical architectures is a key theme in Kerich’s practice and game-based art more broadly…

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Matteo Bittanti


Works cited

Chris Kerich

Katamari Dreams

Screenshots, gifs produced with live memory disassembling software to hack Katamari Damacy (Namco, 2004), 2016

The Midday Channel

Screenshots, gifs produced with live memory disassembling software to hack Persona 4 (Atlus, 2008), 2017

All images courtesy of Chris Kerich

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ARTICLE: JOHN CHAMBERLAIN LIVES ON

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 series Dynamic Kinetic Sculptures.

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Like the previously discussed Piles(2018), Dynamic Kinetic Sculptures (2017) utilizes the mechanics of video games in unconventional ways in order to produce glitch art and reveal the underlying systems and hidden ideologies. However, whereas Piles employed violence and repetition to provoke discomfort, Keric’s previous work Dynamic Kinetic Sculptures taps into the joyful anarchy and broken physics of glitch art.

In this series, Kerich builds impossible vehicular constructions using the editor in the soft-body physics driving simulator BeamNG.drive. Vehicles are stacked, fused, and contorted into chaotic sculptures that burst into flames or cause extreme glitching of the physics engine when simulated. According to the artist, this project was inspired by the vernacular YouTube series Car Boys, in which the hosts push BeamNG to its limits to produce an absurdist, often hilarious spectacle.

BeamNG.drive is notable for its advanced soft-body physics simulation which allows vehicles to crumple, deform, and come apart in dynamic ways during crashes. Both Piles and Dynamic Kinetic Sculptures  use exploitation of game systems against their intended purpose in order to surface hidden logics, biases and prerogatives. But whereas the former is painstakingly structured and demanding of both artist and viewer in terms of duration and access (it was originally livestreamed on Twitch for 22 hours), Dynamic Kinetic Sculptures embraces playful serendipity, shorter length, and post facto consumption. It follows in a lineage of glitch art that finds meaning in rupturing systems through technical abuse rather than programmatic critique.

And while Piles implicates masculinity and power relations in its repetitive symbolic violence, Dynamic Kinetic Sculptures has no such explicit agenda beyond visible chaos. In fact, the Car Boys inspiration anchors it firmly in the juvenile but often creative energy of tinkering that many first experience in childhood, usually coded ‘male’: like video games, automobiles are connoted as “boys’ toys”, that is, tools and technologies that promote masculine ideals of competition, power, status, domination, and aggression through play, often emphasizing technical mastery and…

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Matteo Bittanti

Works cited

Chris Kerich

Digital Kinetic Sculptures

digital video/machinima, color, sound, various length, 2017, United States.

digital images, 2017, United States.

All images and videos courtesy of the Artist.

Read more about Chamberlain’s sculptures.

Read more about Brenton Alexander Smith.

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ARTICLE: FOLDERS FULL OF BODIES

VRAL is currently showcasing Chris Kerich’s latest project Three Impossible Worlds. To accompany the exhibition, we’ll be discussing several artworks that comprise his oeuvre. Today, we examine his monumental project Piles (2018).

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Piles is a video art project that explores the symbolic and political dimensions of piling up dead or unconscious bodies in video games. Between 2020-2021, the artist, Chris Kerich, livestreamed over 22 hours of gameplay footage on Twitch of him creating piles of bodies across seven different video games. His goal was to turn an uncritical and common practice in gaming communities into a critical interrogation of how games incorporate concepts of life, death, and bodies into their design.

The games selected represent a mix of big-budget productions titles like Hitman, independent games like Viscera Cleanup Detail (which we presented within the context of the 2021 Milan Machinima Festival in a 80 minute cut), and a game creation platform, Tabletop Simulator. This range allows for different perspectives on the theme. The piles created are meant to evoke real-life piles of bodies from sites of atrocity, like Abu Ghraib, where Kerich sees resonances with the unconstrained power to violate bodies often granted to players in games. As a straight white American man, Kerich implicates himself and his own position of power in creating these spectacles…

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Matteo Bittanti

Works cited

Chris Kerich

Piles (excerpt)

digital video/machinima (1152 x 720), color, sound, 14”, 2018-2020, United States.

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EVENT: CHRIS KERICH (OCTOBER 27 - NOVEMBER 9 2023, ONLINE)

Three Impossible Worlds

digital video, color, sound, 2022, 11’ 14”, United States

Created by Chris Kerich

A speculative digital art project that probes the underlying logic and limitations of procedural world generation Three Impossible Worlds was developed with/in the popular video game Minecraft. The artist began by conceptualizing a series of thought experiments: worlds deemed “impossible” within Minecraft’s existing generative framework. By subverting the game’s expected parameters, Three Impossible Worlds surfaces latent politics and ingrained assumptions coded into procedural systems. 

Chris Kerich is a programmer and artist living and working in Lethbridge, Alberta. Kerich is interested in systems, constrained art, information, critical science studies, and video games. Chris is currently an Assistant Professor at the University of Lethbridge. He received his doctorate from the program in Film and Digital Media Studies at the University of California, Santa Cruz, and he has received a Master of Arts from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) in 2017 and a Bachelor of Science from Carnegie Mellon University in 2013. Kerich’s creative endeavors have garnered international recognition and have been featured in retrospectives and events like the Milan Machinima Festival (2021, 2019, Milan, Italy) and Vector Festival (2018, Toronto, Canada).