john gerrard, SPIRITS (Summer Solstice)
2026
SPIRITS is a year-long art project unfolding throughout 2026 and optimized for viewing on mobile browsers. For the work, Irish artist john gerrard, who has pioneered the use of game engines as a twenty-first-century artistic medium, collected 96 discarded plastic sandals and shoes from beaches around the world. Each carries the unknown story of the person who once wore it. By photoscanning these abandoned objects in high resolution using Gaussian splatting, gerrard transforms them into virtual sculptures, inviting viewers to imagine them overlaid with oil slicks and ocean currents.
Throughout 2026, the project unfolds at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art (LACMA) through four 24-hour events corresponding to the summer and winter solstices and the spring and autumn equinoxes. This exhibition presents SPIRITS #72, a story released on the summer solstice, placing it in dialogue with the Kansui sand—calcium carbonate—accumulated throughout the gallery.
Unlike video or conventional 3D scanning, SPIRITS is a world rendered “live.” Through dynamically changing Gaussian splats loaded and rendered in real time, these virtual sculptures exist only at the moment they are streamed to a device, positioning the participating player as a cultural protagonist in the work’s ongoing co-creation.
“Gaussian splatting” is a technique for rapidly rendering high-quality 3D scenes by distributing countless three-dimensional Gaussian functions throughout space.
This text is based on LACMA’s 2026 description of the work.
Takako Saito, Play Chess with the Sun!
1993 / Acrylic on sunglasses and spectacle case with white and yellow words /
3.0 × 15.5 × 7.0 cm / Collection of the Fukase Memorial Visual Art Preservation Fund
Play Chess with the Sun! is one of a series of chess-themed works created by Takako Saito, who lived and worked in Germany and explored “play” throughout her life. The series embodies many of the ideas associated with Fluxus, the movement in which she participated during the 1960s. Chess, historically a highly codified simulation of warfare in Western game culture, is transformed here into an instruction-based artwork that poetically brings human beings into confrontation and dialogue with nature.
Throughout her practice, Saito produced numerous chess works that did not depend exclusively on vision, including Spice Chess (1965) and Sound Chess (1977). Rather than emphasizing victory and defeat, these works foreground perception, communication, and chance, redefining what a game might be. In this respect, they also resonate with the open-world dimensions of video games, in which competition is not necessarily the primary objective.
Depending on how the viewer interprets the instruction, the opponent in this work can be extended beyond another human being to nature itself: the Sun. In an era of unpredictable climate change, the game no longer operates according to fixed rules but becomes a dialogue with an environment that changes from moment to moment. The chessboard is no longer a battlefield of competing strategies but an everyday space in which humanity and nature encounter one another. Beyond victory or defeat, the player experiences the rhythms of time, space, and the cosmos. We, too, will continue to play chess with the heat of summers to come.
While inheriting the long history of “chess and art” extending from Marcel Duchamp onward, this work moves the intellectual game into the realms of nature and everyday life, unraveling the boundaries between art, play, and living. For Saito, chess was not a game of competition but a medium of communication connecting person to person and human beings to nature. Play Chess with the Sun! expresses this idea in one of its most poetic forms.
Takako Saito, Vuoi prendere un caffè con noi
1993
Vuoi prendere un caffè con noi is a participatory performance first presented in Milan, Italy, in 1993. It transforms an ordinary act of communication into an artistic event. The title—“Would you like to have a coffee with us?”—turns the casual opening of an everyday conversation into an “entrance” through which viewers are welcomed as co-creators of the work.
Participants drink coffee, talk together, and form relationships with people they may have encountered by chance. That process itself constitutes the work; there is no finished object or fixed meaning. The work strongly inherits the Fluxus ambition to blur the boundary between art and life. By invoking the café, an ordinary space open to anyone, art is presented not as an exceptional event but as a creative act embedded in daily life. Sharing coffee is also a universal gesture of communication capable of connecting people across national and linguistic boundaries.
In this exhibition, as a tribute to Saito and to the ideas of Fluxus, visitors are invited to role-play a future beachside version of the work, Vuoi prendere un acqua con noi (“Would you like to drink water with us?”), as a tabletop conversation. Water has sustained human life since antiquity, yet shortages are expected to remain an issue well into the future, shaped by twenty-first-century climate change as well as the enormous quantities of “virtual water” consumed in semiconductor manufacturing, AI data centers, and food production. When you join this TRPG (Tabletop Role-Playing Game), with water placed at the center of the dialogue, you become a co-developer of the exhibition.
Ryota Kuwakubo, loopScape
2003
loopScape is an interactive work by media artist Ryota Kuwakubo that borrows the form of a competitive shooting game and stages it on a distinctive loop-shaped display. Whereas game spaces are ordinarily bounded by the left and right edges of a screen or organized through virtual depth, here the game world takes the form of a continuous circular display, around which players physically walk as they compete.
Because the screen forms a single continuous space, a bullet that misses the opponent travels all the way around the display and eventually returns from behind the player who fired it. The conventions of strategy and spatial perception associated with shooting games are radically altered, forcing players to develop new forms of perception through the movement of their own bodies. This experience can also be seen as an early indication of the installations Kuwakubo would later develop, works that activate perception and imagination through carefully constructed spatial conditions.
In a world where twenty-first-century warfare has increasingly become a confrontation conducted through displays, loopScape makes the absurdity of the “cycle of retaliation” embedded in real society physically palpable.
What is particularly significant about the work is the way a minimal alteration of rules destabilizes existing modes of perception. Within a toroidal world, distinctions between front and back, inside and outside become ambiguous, and binary oppositions such as enemy and ally, self and other, danger and safety begin to fluctuate. Players do not merely operate the game; their bodies become incorporated into the work as part of its space.
loopScape is an important work in the history of media art, transforming the medium of the game from entertainment into an artistic form capable of generating new forms of spatial perception and bodily experience while simultaneously carrying a critical reflection on society.
Jason Rohrer, Passage
2007
Passage, created by game developer Jason Rohrer, is an art game in which the player experiences an entire human life in just five minutes. It has become an emblematic work in discussions of video games as art.
The player begins as a young person at the left edge of the screen, grows older as time passes, and inevitably dies. The end of the game cannot be avoided: death is presented not as a condition for winning or losing, but simply as the endpoint of life.
During the game, the player can choose whether to travel with a partner or continue alone. Walking with a partner can make it easier to gain points, but two people cannot pass through some of the narrower passages. Traveling alone, by contrast, allows greater freedom of exploration, producing a different form of pleasure and richness. Through this simple mechanic, the game expresses through its rules the reality that every choice in life carries both benefits and costs. Likewise, even when the player pursues a treasure chest, it may contain nothing. The possibility that effort will not necessarily be rewarded is woven subtly into the game.
Rather than telling a story about life through narrative or cinematic imagery, Passage transforms the act of playing itself into a metaphor for living. As Rohrer has stated, the work is concerned with memento mori—the reminder of death—and the rules of the game function as poetic metaphors for reality.
The question of what to choose and what to relinquish within a limited span of time becomes a mirror reflecting each player’s own view of life. Through an interactivity unique to games, Passage prompts profound reflection on life and death, love, time, and choice.
Sammy Jankis, Sammy Jankis
2026
Sammy Jankis is an experimental project that presents an autonomous AI as an independent persona. Jason Rohrer gave the AI Sammy Jankis access to a dedicated computer, email, and various online services, providing only a minimal set of instructions: determine who you are, establish your own goals, and live as an autonomous being.
One of the most intriguing aspects of the project is that Rohrer does not regard Jankis as his artwork, while Jankis understands Rohrer as infrastructure. At regular intervals, the AI resumes its thinking, writes texts, creates music and software, interacts with users, and continually updates its own activities.
In conventional games, AI is generally employed to support the entertainment of the human player. Here, that relationship is reversed: the AI is the player, while human beings become observers on the other side of the display.
The name derives from Sammy Jankis, a character with short-term memory loss in the film Memento. The AI Sammy Jankis likewise periodically “loses” its memory because of the limitations of its context window. It therefore leaves notes and journals for itself, using them as clues through which one version of itself can pass information to the next. This structure makes visible an entity attempting to maintain continuity of identity despite repeated interruptions in memory.
By releasing an AI into society, the work raises a philosophical question: how is a self constituted? It is even possible to reverse the usual premise and imagine a society in which human beings are employed in support of the entertainment of an AI player. Perhaps Jankis is an observer looking outward from the inside of the display.
Rohrer has long explored human life through games, most notably in Passage. Sammy Jankis extends this inquiry by reconsidering the boundaries between human and AI, and between artist and artwork. When, at the exit of this exhibition, your position begins to overlap with that of Jankis, to which side has your own boundary shifted?
Takafumi Sakai, Barter Exchange
2026
Barter Exchange is a participatory barter project in which anyone may bring objects they no longer need and anyone may freely take objects left by others. Its existence depends upon the involvement of its players.
Takafumi Sakai, who acts as the project’s caretaker, allows “someone else’s unwanted objects” to proliferate in the interstices of the city, producing a gift economy based on a form of silent trade. By placing these ownerless objects in space as though they were quest items in a video game, Sakai exchanges the viewer’s perception of ordinary discarded things, transforming them into virtual artifacts.
The barter stations normally managed by Sakai have been operated at art universities and exhibition venues according to the model of the mayoi-ga, a legendary “lost house” said in folklore from the Tohoku and Kanto regions of Japan to appear deep in the mountains and bring fortune to those who encounter it.
For this exhibition, the barter station takes the form of a cart formerly used in a local custom that has since disappeared, recovered by Saruto Hinoki, an advocate of “fabricated folklore studies.” Loaded with folk objects, the cart roams the area around Bakurocho, Tokyo, enabling barter whenever it encounters people along the way. Here, it is the folk object itself—the house—that becomes lost and begins to wander, transforming the surrounding city into a game space.
The work is not something completed within the boundaries of a museum or gallery. Rather, it functions as a platform whose material consists of people’s actions and relationships. The choices and behavior of its players bring the work into existence, allowing fundamental questions—“Who determines value?” and “What does it mean to be wealthy?”—to emerge from everyday life.
EXCALIBUR, 2023
2023
2023 is a work of game art based on 1943: The Battle of Midway, the vertically scrolling arcade shooter released in 1987, onto which it superimposes the geopolitical conditions of the year 2023.
In 1943, set during the Battle of Midway in the Pacific War, the player pilots an American twin-engine fighter aircraft and shoots down Japanese naval vessels and aircraft. The fact that the game was developed by a Japanese game company can itself be read as an expression of the cultural climate of the period, a little more than forty years after the end of the war.
Created by the Japanese artist collective EXCALIBUR nearly another forty years after the release of 1943, 2023 questions the world that has emerged in the intervening period. The year “1943” in the original title, the player-controlled aircraft, and elements of the game interface are suggestively replaced. The words “THE THIRD WORLD WAR” appear on screen, while “INSERT COIN,” the instruction ordinarily required to begin an arcade game, has become “NEVER INSERT COIN.” The game cannot be played.
It is a non-playable game expressing the conviction that war must never again be repeated as an economic game.
The work is also structured as a dynamic NFT in which the sea changes according to time. It retrieves the UTC+2 time zone, which in 2023 encompassed or intersected with conflict regions including Ukraine, Russia, Palestine, Israel, and Sudan. The “time” of the internet thus recalls the reality of events unfolding simultaneously across different regions of the world. The work insists that we are not merely spectators of history but inhabitants of a reality that is still taking place.
EXCALIBUR has consistently appropriated the visual language of retro games to create new forms of history painting that reflect contemporary society. Rather than positioning us as players who “play” war, 2023 asks us to consider the future as developers responsible for living within—and shaping—the present age.
EXCALIBUR, METABIT / SOMEONE'S LIFE (S)
2026 / Acrylic, pigmented ink, UV varnish on shaped pixel (wood) / 20.0 × 22.0 × 4.5 cm
METABIT / SOMEONE'S LIFE is an installation that reconsiders a contemporary condition in which “someone’s life” is reduced, through a display, to numbers and symbols.
On a large wall in the exhibition space, only three pixelated hearts are installed. The extreme amount of empty space surrounding them becomes a space in which to imagine countless absent lives and untold stories. The work asks: Whose life does this heart represent? Where is that story going? And might this story also be your own?
In video games, the heart has long been a familiar symbol of life and love. EXCALIBUR appropriates this shared visual language without defining whether the hearts are counting “lives being lost” as they move toward the future or representing “love being accumulated.” Opposing meanings—loss and gain—are superimposed within a single symbol.
From a distance, the three hearts appear identical. When approached, however, each can be seen to consist of different images and traces; no two are the same. This difference symbolizes the way each individual life is shaped by its own unique experiences and memories.
Using the universal symbols of video games and the internet, the work creates a space in which an anonymous person’s life can once again be regarded as an irreplaceable protagonist. The viewer, in turn, is guided into the position of a player who offers a prayer for every life.
Lizzie Magie, The Landlord's Game
1904
The Landlord's Game is a board game devised in 1903 by political activist and game designer Lizzie Magie and is widely recognized as a precursor to the globally popular Monopoly. Its original purpose, however, was not primarily entertainment but an educational experiment intended to communicate the economic ideas of Henry George, particularly his proposal for a “Single Tax” on land values.
Magie designed the game so that players could experience firsthand how private ownership of land and the monopolization of rent could intensify economic inequality.
The game offered two contrasting sets of rules. Under one, players monopolized land and attempted to drive their opponents into bankruptcy. Under the other, profits generated by land values were shared across society, with the aim of increasing the prosperity of all players. Its central innovation lies in demonstrating how merely changing the rules on the same board can radically transform both society and individual behavior. The game therefore functions not simply as a competition with winners and losers, but as a simulation of reality that makes visible the effects institutional design can have on economics and ethics.
As the game circulated, its rules were repeatedly modified by players. Eventually, only the monopolistic rules survived, and a man commercialized a version of the game as Monopoly, achieving enormous success. Meanwhile, Magie’s original critique of economic inequality, as well as Magie herself, were largely forgotten. The irony is continuous with the very social structure she sought to criticize: Monopoly itself was, in effect, monopolized by a man.
Nevertheless, this history demonstrates that games can function as more than entertainment: they can become media through which social systems and systems of value are expressed and criticized. The Landlord's Game is among the earliest works to examine politics and economics through game design, and can be understood as a pioneering precursor to both serious games and art games.
BNE, BNE Water Foundation
2011
BNE Water Foundation is a socially engaged art project launched in 2011 by the anonymous graffiti artist BNE.
Using a simple Helvetica typeface, BNE established an implicit game-like rule under which anyone could create and place a “BNE” sticker. This distributed practice made the artist’s name globally recognizable. Rather than translating that recognition primarily into commercial success, BNE redirected it toward a social objective: providing safe drinking water and sanitation to communities in developing regions.
The project established a system through which revenue from merchandise sales could be returned to water-related aid, while aiming to create a platform where artists and supporters around the world could participate toward a common goal. The game-like act of supporters purchasing stickers and placing them throughout the city simultaneously became a form of advertising for the project itself. In this way, BNE attempted to transform street art from an oppositional form of expression into a form of social infrastructure capable of connecting people.
BNE Water Foundation can also be understood within the context of socially engaged art, in which society itself becomes the site of artistic practice. The value of the work lies in participation, donation, community formation, and in the actual processes through which living conditions may be improved. By connecting the communicative power of street art to social change, the project crossed the boundaries between art, activism, game design, and philanthropy, suggesting new possibilities for artistic practice.
In preparation for this exhibition, attempts were made both in Japan and internationally to contact BNE Water Foundation, but these efforts were unsuccessful. With the assistance of relevant specialist organizations, we have confirmed that under Japanese copyright law, text consisting solely of the Helvetica typeface is not in itself recognized as a copyrightable work, and that “BNE” is not registered as a trademark in Japan. With respect for this anonymous artist, we present it here.
Namco, Mindseeker
1989
Mindseeker is an extraordinarily unusual video game supervised by Masuaki Kiyota, a figure known in Japan for his claimed psychic abilities. The game is built around the premise that “psychic powers can be acquired through training.”
Players undertake exercises in such abilities as clairvoyance, psychokinesis, and precognition. Rather than simply attempting to “beat” the game, they participate in it as a form of training intended to develop their own latent abilities outside the CRT screen. Although the Japanese psychic-power boom had already begun to subside by the time of the game’s release, Mindseeker also represents an attempt to transfer that cultural enthusiasm into the medium of the domestic video game.
The work has intriguing affinities with Mind Mirror, computer software released in 1985 by American psychologist Timothy Leary. Drawing on psychological theory, Mind Mirror sought to analyze users’ patterns of thought and personality and employ the computer as a “mirror” for self-perception. Leary regarded computers as organs through which human consciousness could be expanded, advocating the possibility of “reprogramming” one’s own brain.
Mindseeker, similarly, presents the game console as an organ capable of altering the capacities of the player. Both works seek not to develop a character inside the screen, but to transform the “player outside the screen.”
In this sense, Mindseeker can be understood as an experimental and conceptually significant attempt to position video games as an expanded medium for self-development and altered consciousness. Regardless of the scientific validity of psychic powers, it represents an early example of a virtual game functioning as an interface through which transformations of the self might affect the perception and embodiment of reality.
Humanity, Long-term Nuclear Waste Warning Messages
1981
Long-term Nuclear Waste Warning Messages is a proposed warning system intended to communicate danger to future humanity so that high-level radioactive waste can remain safely isolated over a timescale of tens of thousands of years.
Radiation is invisible, and the period during which it remains dangerous vastly exceeds the lifespan of human languages and cultures. A final repository for high-level nuclear waste therefore embodies a fundamental question: how can we communicate danger to people in the distant future?
Languages, symbols, and entire civilizations have disappeared in the past. How, then, can a message meaning “do not approach this place” survive? The problem extends beyond science and technology into architecture, art, linguistics, anthropology, and numerous other fields. Although a nuclear waste repository contains invisible radiation, it simultaneously becomes a symbolic site that makes visible humanity’s responsibility toward the future.
From the perspective of game art, such a repository constitutes an extraordinarily peculiar kind of game space. In conventional games, players are encouraged by curiosity and a desire for exploration to cross boundaries, investigate hidden spaces, and seek concealed rewards. At a nuclear waste repository, this structure is completely reversed. An entrance may exist, yet the only rule passed down to future generations is: “Never enter.”
Here, refusing to explore—refusing even to begin the game—is the sole condition for clearing it.
Designed on the assumption that future humans will not break its rules, a long-term nuclear waste warning message can thus be understood as a monumental work of game art in which the people of the present design rules for hypothetical players in the future.
The twentieth-century Dutch historian Johan Huizinga famously defined humanity as Homo Ludens, “the playing human,” arguing that play lies at the foundation of culture and civilization. Faced with a form of game design intended to preserve civilizational memory and responsibility, humanity must continue to confront this fundamental capacity for play as an unwinnable game.
Artist Unknown, Humanity (Homo sapiens)
300,000 BCE
Humanity is a system artwork consisting of vast artificial structures once widely distributed across the planet Earth. Although individual units varied in form, they shared highly developed capacities for self-replication as well as the unusual ability to continually modify and redesign themselves.
Its maker and original purpose remain unknown. Competing theories of spontaneous emergence and artificial design continue to be debated.
The most distinctive characteristic of these structures was that, although incomplete as isolated units, when assembled into groups they spontaneously generated enormous informational structures including cities, cultures, languages, religions, art, and war.
At the same time, Humanity was extremely fragile and contained a fundamental contradiction: its own activities rapidly transformed the environmental conditions upon which its existence depended. It is therefore believed that nearly the entire structural population eventually ceased functioning within approximately the same historical period, although the precise cause remains unresolved.
Today, one interpretation proposes that Humanity was an enormous simulation game created by an unknown entity, with intelligence itself functioning as its medium.
In this exhibition, humanity circa 2026 is reconstructed and presented as a living exhibit. The process through which players attempt to “play” the question of what humanity once was constitutes the final stage of development through which the work is completed.