sjors rigters

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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MEDIA COVERAGE: NEITHER ARTIFICIAL NOR INTELLIGENT: MACHINIMA IN THE AGE OF AI (ITALIAN)

What is the relationship between machinima and AI? A new article on Duels magazine provides an overview courtesy of T.L. Taylor, Marshall McLuhan, and Kate Crawford. Not to mention Ben Nicholson, Total Refusal, Andrea Gatopolous, Mathias Wolff, Sjors Rigters, and Kent Sheely.

Text in Italian

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EVENT: SJORS RIGTERS (APRIL 22 - MAY 5 2022, ONLINE)

THE VIRTUAL FRONTIER

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

Created by Sjors Rigters

The popular video game Minecraft exemplifies the inner contradictions of the digital age. Lauded by many pundits as a highly creative form of entertainment, the so-called “digital LEGO” is a powerful vessel for neoliberal ideologies and hyper-capitalistic imperatives, with its frenzy of accumulation, extraction, circulation, production, and exploitation. An effective indoctrination tool now pervasive in thousands of US elementary schools, Minecraft is a techno-dream of endless growth, a manifesto for the perpetuation of devastating patterns of consumption, competition, and destruction. Informed by colonialist principles, its gameplay elevates numbing grinding routines into a recipe for the good life, casting the player as both a conqueror and an entrepreneur. In his video The Virtual Frontier, Dutch designer Sjors Rigters brings to the foreground the toxic message of one of the most successful video games of all time.

Sjors Rigters (b. 1995) is a graphic designer specializing in visual identity and editorial design. After receiving his BA in Graphic Design at the Royal Academy of Art, The Hague, he opened his own studio. Sjors lives and works in Rotterdam, The Netherlands.

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