Tannon Reckling (tr2330@nyu.edu) / *Edited: Oct. 19th, 2022
Blog Link: https://foreclosedgaybar.github.io
Text Link: https://docs.google.com/document/d/1PKwA9ZExM04pQ6sDR7o7uz3fstwhhrykaVfLsqsi2c0/edit
Exhibition Website: https://www.moma.org/calendar/exhibitions/5453
Photos taken during my visit: https://drive.google.com/drive/folders/1MD5pBQZweyZnnhUaitxe-x1nvF4OxQcJ?usp=sharing
Engaging ‘Never Alone: Video Games and Other Interactive Design’ for Pedagogical Purposes
I am briefly examining the introductory text of the exhibition Never Alone: Video Games and Other Interactive Design currently up at MoMA. The introduction vinyl wall text is one of the first things visitors pass as they enter the space. I am interested in what epistemologies or ontologies are being concretized within this introduction text from MoMA when creating a sensibility of engagement with its wide content. The provided didactic information serves as an overview of the exhibition as well as a learning resource for those engaging the exhibition in different contexts (probably later online). The exhibition contents are far-ranging (video game demos, text, icons, artifacts, hardware, software, screens, and more) but also are constricted by solely being objects from MoMA’s permanent collection. The exhibition didactic text is one way to aggregate all the different forms and their contexts through a more distant reading. I will analyze the exhibition and didactic through N. Katherine Hayles’s article “How We Think: Transforming Power and Digital Technologies” from the larger text Understanding Digital Humanities from our course.
There is a tension within the exhibition: it is both a comprehensive survey, and yet is constricted due to collection locales. I believe it is constricted by its desired expansiveness especially in comparison to large scale databases or archives of similar content. As Hayles posits in her essay around defining current digital humanities, “Nowhere is this contentious vitality more evident than in the field’s definition. The rapid pace of technological change correlates in the digital humanities with different emphases, opening a window onto the field’s history, the controversies that have shaped it, and the tensions that continue to resonate through it.” I place this exhibition (a lovely aggregation of access points about some video games and the history of some interactive design) in a tension between first wave and second wave digital humanities. I believe the museum context (copyright, collection law, handling, archiving, and more) place the exhibition within a pedagogical logic of friction.
I encounter a gap, this friction, in the exhibition: between its traditional museum setting and the intellectual inquiries it blankets over its contents. There is a relatability around technology use today that is taken for granted in space; there is an unformalized rhizomatic connection of associations created between the contents in the show. What associations are created when putting a video game Minecraft demo next to a didactic about the history of the power icon? In describing a sort of friction in the ‘paradigm shift’ within rapidly changing technology and theory produced through and around it, Hayles states, “Although the interactions between print and digital media may be synergistic, as in the examples above, they can also generate friction when the digital humanities move in directions foreign to the traditional humanities. As scale grows exponentially larger, visualization tools become increasingly necessary.” During my first initial visit, and still now examining and reflecting on the exhibition, I continue to have a sort of friction in my engagement with the exhibition. I needed the introduction text, because there were many disparate objects and materialisms, but I also enjoyed my flow of attention and wandering choreography around the exhibition without strict guides.
When entering the exhibition space for ‘Never Alone: Video Games and Other Interactive Design’ viewers are greeted with introductory didactic vinyl wall text that reads:
“With their relentless pop-ups and alerts, our devices like to remind us that we spend a huge portion of our lives in the digital realm. All of our interactions there, whether in Zoom and WhatsApp or Discord and Minecraft, take place through interfaces: the visual and touchable elements that allow us to communicate with machines, apps, and entire infrastructures. Interfaces, like other everyday tools, are seldom recognized as design in their own right, but they are powerful examples of interactive design — The field that considers the points of contact between objects and people, and the ways in which contact can shape our behavior.
Never Alone: Video Games and Other Interactive Design brings together notable works from this field, all drawn from MoMA’s collection. In video games, the exhibition’s focus, the interface is more than means to an end; it is the conduit to the narrative and the experience as a whole — its ease, dynamic, and emotional resonance. They are organized in three sections highlighting critical aspects of gaming interaction — a game’s input, its designer, and the players who bring it to life — through works that range from iconic global gits (such as Pac-Man) to encounters with the absurd (such as Everything is Going to Be OK). These appear alongside examples of interactive design that have reshaped our world, some as simple as the universal @ sign and others as complex as a remote graffiti device.
This exhibition explores how interactive design transforms us, influences the way we experience our bodies, and changes our perception of space, time, and relationships. Above all, Never Alone emphasizes design’s role in connecting us with one another and with the pulse of the world.”
Within this blog post I ask myself the following: How are we defining the ‘digital realm’ today? How important is it that the exhibition content is solely from MoMA’s collection? What is being referred to as the ‘pulse of the world’ in this context? I see ‘Never Alone: Video Games and Other Interactive Design’ as a wonderful collection of access points that allow for a deep dive into various histories, if they choose. However, I question the statements the exhibition forces upon the work as it squeezes its content into a museum context: with its own vernacular — whose language is being used; what’s being gained; scales of extractions — and how might we survey the contemporary? All these questions can be related to contemporary uses of a database.
Ultimately, I see this exhibition most useful as performing a database: a collection of histories to be accessed depending on one’s needs or serendipitous random encounter. The jump in the physical exhibition space from “the history of the power icon” to “a demo of Minecraft” to “a weird virus video game” to “Susan Kare’s Graphic Icon Sketch ephemera” and more are seemingly big jumps. I reconcile my brief analysis of the exhibition expository text and its contents through this database metaphor. Especially through how Hayles describes databases and their potentiality: “Another advantage of databases is the ability to craft different kinds of interfaces, depending on what users are likely to find useful or scholars want to convey. Given a sufficiently flexible structure, a large archive can have elements coded into a database for which different scholars can construct multiple interfaces.” I believe Never Alone: Video Games and Other Interactive Design is part of a new interpretation and collaborative method that is increasingly common in museum settings to reconcile competition with contemporary large digital databases and existing in increasingly globalized digital information infrastructures. I rise questions around data or technology stewardship from this exhibitions as if goes back and forth between entertainment spectacle and information aggregation.
Works Cited:
-Hayles, N. Katherine. “How We Think: Transforming Power and Digital Technologies” in Understanding Digital Humanities. 2012.
-Exhibition Opening Wall Text. Exhibition: Never Alone: Video Games and Other Interactive Design. MoMA. 2022.
-Relationships to questions around data or technology stewardship from Adelheid Heftberger, Lev Manovich, Vannebar Bush, David M. Berry, and others.
-Thinking about museums’ trouble with staying relevant: like paper media keeping up with online digital media. Experimental access point: https://www.e-flux.com/journal/60/61026/is-a-museum-a-database-institutional-conditions-in-net-utopia/
Interactive Media Archive: Collaborative Multimedia Resource 