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…
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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