WoW @ Laguna Art Museum

09 Jun WoW @ Laguna Art Museum

This is going to be a gamers wet dream. This weekend the Laguna Art Museum opens WoW Emergent Media Phenomenon. The members opening is Saturday night but the show will be open to the public on Sunday. Some info:

WoW: Emergent Media Phenomenon
explores various forms of cultural production based on World of Warcraft in particular and on
gaming in general. While surveying Warcraft's Fifteen-year history, the
exhibition looks at artistic practices that have been influenced by game
culture. The actual works by the producer of World of Warcraft, Blizzard
Entertainment (headquartered in Irvine,
California), provide a starting
point and reference. 

Fourteen
international artists were selected to consider this movement with the
following themes in mind: elements of desire, the collapse of fantasy,
medievalism, creative critiques, and public intervention.  Artists in this
exhibition take on the visual marker of World
of Warcraft to consider, implications of gaming, and their
greater impact on our culture.  In addition to the works of these artists,
fan art and the growing culture of machinima (computer animation that uses the
graphic engines from video games) will be explored in this exhibition. 

Gaming is
a movement that encompasses a large population and holds the potential to
greatly impact society. Jane McGonigal, a game designer and researcher, states,
"This is a new generation of hard-core gamers, and what they're
doing is generating unprecedented participation bandwidth. They are donating
more cognitive cycles, more heart share to game worlds and virtual worlds than
we've seen dedicated to any project before." The artists in this
exhibition have extended these concerns. 

The
exhibition
is curated by Grace Kook-Anderson and is accompanied by a booklet
published by Laguna Art Museum. As part of
the exhibition, you'll receive a booklet featuring essays by the
curator;
participating artist, Eddo Stern; and the curator at Blizzard
Entertainment, Tim Campbell. This booklet is published by Laguna Art
Museum.

Participating artists: selected artists from Blizzard Entertainment, including
Chris Metzen, Sam Didier (a.k.a., Samwise), Chris Robinson, Justin Thavirat,
and Roman Kenney (all from Irvine); Aram Bartholl (Berlin); Jorg Dubin (Laguna
Beach); Alexander Galloway (New York); Jacqueline Goss (New York); Auriea
Harvey and Michaël Samyn, Tale of Tales (Ghent, Belgium); John Klima
(Lisbon, Portugal); Cyril Kuhn (Los Angeles); Antoinette LaFarge (Irvine);
Mashallah Design and Linda Kostowski (Berlin); Robert Nideffer and Alex Szeto
(Irvine); Airyka Rockefeller (San Francisco); Eddo Stern (Los Angeles); The
Third Faction (Azeroth); and Zeng Han (Guangzhou)