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Fictional texts (fake newspapers, fabricated game notes and in-game recharge records for research purposes)
Spatial scenography (reconstructed living rooms/game rooms from different decades)
Sound design (simulated ambient noise from different gaming eras)
Costs – This must be reflected in the budget.
Venue:
A two bedroom unfurnished flat in Edinburgh on zoopla（Mcdonald Road, Edinburgh EH7）
（This is a public rental flat with no furniture. With minimal setup, it can be turned into an exhibition space. Curating in Edinburgh does not require legal permission, but confirmation from the landlord is necessary.）https://www.zoopla.co.uk/to-rent/details/69761818/
Duration:
Aug 19-20, 2025
Exhibition setup / Installation period
Aug 21-24, 2025
Exhibition open to the public
Aug 25-26, 2025
De-installation / Takedown
workshop twice daily, each session lasting 4 hours.
Contents：
Room 1: Playroom as History This room is divided into four corners by translucent curtains, each representing a specific gaming space from the past. Visitors walk through different time periods, encountering the material culture, visual language, and social atmosphere of historical gaming.
Corner 1 – 1970s Living Room: Featuring early home consoles like the Magnavox Odyssey or Atari 2600, accompanied by retro furniture and magazines, this space evokes the origins of home gaming in the West.
Corner 2 – 1980s Living Room: A typical 1980s middle-class living room with a Nintendo Famicom or Sega Master System, reflecting the rise of genre-driven gaming and media convergence.
Corner 3 – Soviet Youth Club Gaming Corner: A rare look at the underground and state-sponsored gaming culture of the Soviet Union, with local electronic games and arcade-inspired devices such as the Elektronika series.
Corner 4 – 1990s–2000s Gaming Den: A dimly lit, PC-and-console-heavy room capturing the LAN-party and console war era. Posters, game discs, and early internet aesthetics represent the pre-digital platform fragmentation.
Room 2: The Capitalist Now This room dramatizes the split between two dominant gaming environments of the 2020s: the performative spectacle of esports and the minimalist, mobile-centered individual consumption.
Left Side – The Esports Arena: Decorated with tournament posters, looping highlight reels, and stadium-like seating. It reflects the corporatization of competitive gaming and its transformation into a media-industrial complex.
Right Side – The White Cube: A minimalist space with a single desk housing a PC and PS5, and a couch designated for mobile gaming. The clinical aesthetic emphasizes the privatization and hyper-streamlined logic of today’s gaming consumption.
Room 3: Workshop for Play & Thought A flexible space for participatory programs including public workshops, critical play sessions, panel talks, and speculative design labs. This room is intended to transform visitors from passive observers into active thinkers and co-creators of gaming futures.
Calculate Your Gaming Expenses and Digital Assets
Re-Trial of Landmark Legal Cases in Video Games
Open Conversation with Game Industry Professionals (Tentative)
Curatorial Statement
Video games have never been neutral media—especially when situated within specific social systems. Whether it’s killing enemies, leveling up, looting, or freely trading, building, and capturing attention in virtual cities, these actions mirror the logic and operations of capitalism in the real world.
The exhibition Play and Pay: The Capitalist Evolution of Video Games focuses on how video games have been shaped and regulated by the processes of global capitalism—and how, in turn, they actively participate in shaping our cultural perceptions and modes of consumption.
The exhibition is structured around living rooms/game rooms from different decades, using gaming consoles, magazines, playable video games, fictional newspapers, and archival materials to guide visitors through the evolution from arcade culture to today’s immersive AAA titles. Visitors are invited to explore how narratives have been disciplined through genre and commodification, how hardware has shifted from exclusive consoles to cross-platform ecosystems to maximize profit, and how game systems—through loot boxes, microtransactions, and virtual economies—construct a closed world where “to play is to consume.”
Accessibility:
Soundproofing; accessible pathways; games (colorblind assistance, audio assistance).
Artists/Artworks/Ethics/Budget/Funding/Partners and Sponsors will be added in future updates to this post.
*This version was updated on March 26 as a revision, offering clearer articulations and raising additional questions—it is may not a final submission.
I’m really glad to have the chance to revisit your curatorial project—we briefly talked about it before.
Your exhibition is a critically ambitious experiment on intimacy. From “generating and burning keywords through alcohol consumption” (Week 5) to the “tactile metaphor of power in sandpaper and tape” (Week 6), you gradually built a multi-layered, evolving spatial theatre. I’m particularly pleased with your revisions in Week 8, where you streamlined the process. As we’ve discussed, overly complex mechanics can undermine the clarity of your curatorial message. You not only adjusted the structure, but also made a clear declaration about this shift—well done!
（In fact, I especially admire your Week 6 observation: “This is not liberation, but a meticulously designed power game—technology becomes the new curator, and the audience becomes complicit through the expenditure of body heat.” This mirrors Claire Bishop’s critique in Artificial Hells of “passive freedom” in participatory art, and inverts Nicolas Bourriaud’s ideal of “touch as an egalitarian bond.” Through sandpaper and adhesive tape, you effectively revealed how touch can comfort—but also harm. It’s a bit of a pity that this tactile layer was dropped in the revised plan, but I understand it was a necessary and reasonable decision.）
From your descriptions, I can clearly imagine a curatorial field charged with anonymity, thermal sensors, and data self-destruction, where “intimacy” becomes something touchable, perceivable—even capable of lashing back. The entanglement between body, technology, and emotion allows the exhibition to reflect not only closeness through heat, but also the consumption and control hidden within it.
That said, I believe there are still TWO areas for improvement:
1. How does your curatorial mechanism convey your core ideas?
Your project might benefit from reconsidering the audience’s threshold for understanding. Your theoretical integration is rich and well-structured—from Erika Balsom’s reflections on the temporality of moving images (Week 8), to Boris Groys’ view of the audience as the “trigger of the event” (Week 6). However, the exhibition shifts rather quickly between “the physicality of intimacy” and “the temporality of digital power,” especially the jump from heat imaging to periodic data cremation. This could dilute your curatorial focus—not just in terms of expression, but also in thematic coherence.
Do you perhaps need supporting materials like a curatorial booklet or didactic panels to articulate this conceptual shift? Are you more focused on observing intimacy and relational behavior—or on curating its “thermal death”? (I’m using the physics term here—meaning the eventual exhaustion of heat, the descent into cold stasis—I think it’s a very COOOOOL metaphor!) You might consider ways to strengthen the conceptual bridge between these two dimensions.
2. How feasible is the participatory structure?
You may also want to further reflect on the practicability of your process. As Shannon Jackson writes in Social Works, the ethics of participatory art lies not in constructing barriers, but in building “supportive structures.” The tiered model introduced in Week 6—where participants must first finish a drink (“Frida’s Vein”) to unlock a Wooclap QR code, and only then access the anonymous dialogue booth—does respond to Claire Bishop’s idea of “antagonistic participation,” but it might also create unnecessary exclusion.
While your revisions in Week 8 helped simplify this structure, a few procedural concerns remain. After all, this is still a bar. When you transform it into a curatorial space, it still carries its original identity. Who are your participants—visitors who came specifically for the show, or casual customers who might just want a drink?
How do you plan to guide those accidental participants into your framework, instead of letting them drift away due to fatigue, confusion, or disinterest? Your design relies on both participation and consumption—but if a participant chooses not to follow the full path, how will it affect their experience? Also, how do you intend to acquire the equipment and software necessary for features like the “Power Fingerprints” or the “Digital Ashes Altar”? Are there precedents for this type of interaction, or at least some proof of feasibility?
Overall, this is an incredibly mature, original, and critically sharp curatorial proposal. It not only challenges the boundaries of exhibition-making, but also those of emotion itself. I’m excited to see how you continue developing the ethical questions of “temporary power” in future work.
References:
Balsom, Erika. After Uniqueness: A History of Film and Video Art in Circulation. New York: Columbia University Press, 2017.
Bishop, Claire. Artificial Hells: Participatory Art and the Politics of Spectatorship. London: Verso Books, 2012.
Bourriaud, Nicolas. Relational Aesthetics. Translated by Simon Pleasance and Fronza Woods. Dijon: Les Presses du Réel, 2002.
Groys, Boris. “Art as Event.” In Going Public, 41–49. Berlin: Sternberg Press, 2010.
Jackson, Shannon. Social Works: Performing Art, Supporting Publics. New York: Routledge, 2011.
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My Comparative Reflection on Curatorial Practice
In contrast to Anonymous Intimacy, which explores the emotional flows of the digital age through multi-sensory participation and data self-destruction mechanisms, Play and Pay adopts a format closer to traditional exhibition structures. It establishes video games as a legitimate medium of contemporary art through a curatorial logic focused on the game-capital relationship.
Both projects deal with themes of interactivity and structural violence, but their starting points differ: the former emphasizes the bodily embedding and data reverberations of individuals within systems, while the latter critiques the system itself—its narratives, devices, and monetization models. Although Play and Pay successfully illustrates how capital drives the game industry, its critical approach remains more indirect when compared to the bodily immediacy of Anonymous Intimacy, where the mechanisms themselves generate a visceral response.
In the future, if Play and Pay could further activate player identity and experiential differences through well-designed didactic panels, it might establish a clearer curatorial personality between academic discourse and sensory experience.
That said, Play and Pay also faces issues of procedural flow. Participants may not follow the intended sequence—they might just play the games without reflecting, skip the texts, or leave quickly. Some may not even understand video games at all, making the entire experience hard to access.
Perhaps the mechanisms could be refined by using more direct, interactive strategies to guide visitor behavior (without becoming overly complex). Spatial design might also establish a more coherent route to ensure visitors have a complete experience. But this also risks feeling authoritarian—like the curator has become a control freak!
During the construction, I am currently improving and translating these contents.
本周的进度主要集中在展览空间的筹备、内容结构的压缩，以及如何让我的策展计划更贴近现实可行性。
一开始，我对《Play and Pay》的设想仍停留在较为理想化的层面：我希望通过“可玩的展览”，让观众在体验中主动思考电子游戏与资本主义之间的结构关系。然而，第九周的教学与同学讨论让我意识到，真正将一个批判性的概念转化为具体的展示语言、展陈空间和观众交互机制，远比预期复杂。尤其是在没有专业建模背景的前提下，我不得不寻求替代方式，比如通过Artsteps等虚拟工具来进行展示模拟。这在一定程度上限制了观众的“物理共感”，但也促使我进一步思考如何将“资本结构”以非物质化方式进行传达。
阅读《Games of Empire》与Bogost对“procedural rhetoric”的批评理论之后，我意识到，游戏系统不仅是趣味机制，更是意识形态的载体。比如《GTA》系列中高度发达的犯罪与掠夺机制，不只是玩家行为的自由，更是在重现新自由主义城市的面貌。而《魔兽世界》的拍卖行、金币交易、装备刷本，几乎就是现实世界资本运作的模型缩影。
