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Brent Watanabe’s MINE (2023) was featured on VRAL between May 19 and June 1 2023 as a single channel video. It is now available on the artist’s website as a collection videos. In this deep dive, we discuss the artwork’s main themes, its relation with previous projects, and the role of the artist walkthrough as documentation.
Brent Watanabe’s Animal Crossing: New Horizons All Mine (2020) and MINE (2021-2022), are intricately connected. The shared presence of the possessive pronoun “mine” in both titles serves as a manifest thread, while the thematic affinities evoke the practice of consumption, accumulation, and hoarding.
Animal Crossing: New Horizons All Mine made its debut during the inaugural season of VRAL in 2020 (e9), in the format of a video walkthrough encapsulating Watanabe’s astute intervention within the popular Nintendo cozy game.In his accompanying statement, the artist divulged his solace-seeking escapades within the realm of ludic escapades during the mandated domestic quarantine, with Animal Crossing emerging as a popular destination and source of refuge for the masses enduring “house arrest”. However, his initial enthusiasm rapidly devolved into disillusionment as he became acutely aware of the game’s real values and prerogatives, goals and mechanics fostering an insidious consumerist ethos. In fact, Watanabe expressed being “taken aback by the endless cycle of purgatory-like existence: waking up, completing rote tasks, consuming, upgrading, discarding, repeating.” In other words, the purported “new horizons” of Animal Crossing lack… novelty. Furthermore, they do not encompass a multitude of possibilities. Instead, a singular horizon emerges, and it is none other than the horizon of consumption.
Instead of shunning the mind-numbing ordeal concocted by the Japanese mega-brand, Watanabe embarked on an acceleratepursuit of hyper-capitalist imperatives, fully immersing himself in the most extravagant and hyperbolic forms of simulated consumption. Over the course of 150+ hours of gameplay, he thoroughly paved the entirety of the virtual island with digital asphalt, while ceaselessly accumulating a vast array of consumer goods, meticulously displaying and piling them upon every available pixel of the landscape. A special kind of window shopping. Remarkably, Watanabe accomplished this impressive feat without resorting to gameplay modifications, in order to bring to the surface the game’s inherent ideological underpinnings. This captivating experience was conscientiously documented as a walkthrough, hereby elevated to the status of video art. Notably, the artwork also exists as a virtual island, accessible to anyone armed with the appropriate codes, and conveniently accessible through the dedicated artwork page. In short, the work can be experienced on multiple levels.
For instance,
Matteo Bittanti
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