From the board game to the digital canvas
The erratic course of internet-fueled culture is churning out more protagonists, apocrypha, and relics than we can handle. Remember when the Canadian musician known as Grimes former partner of one of the world’s most powerful men, the tech entrepreneur Elon Musk – brought a sword to the 2021 Met Gala? The image of a futuristic pop star dragging a medieval knife (made from a melted AR-15, no less) across the red carpet summed up the mysterious way in which contemporary culture seems to be running in all directions, chasing both new and ancient myths.
Simon Denny, an artist working in Berlin, creates sculptures, installations, videos and prints inspired by the aesthetics of technology companies. In two simultaneous shows in Manhattan, he has used omens as a knife to explore the sociopolitical consequences of the tech industry’s preference for medieval knowledge. According to Denny’s, dreams of wizards and blacksmiths, dark forests and damp castles constitute the latest digital realms.
“Dungeon,” Denny’s fifth show with Petzel Gallery in New York features a kind of heaving shrine to Grimes: puffs from an automatic steamer inflate a black “Game of Thrones” T-shirt once owned by the star, installed in a plexiglass case like a take shield. The statue is plugged into a power strip that Denny acquired from a liquidation sale on Twitter during Musk’s mandated transition to X.
Centre, “Read Write Own,” Denny’s first show with Dunkunsthalle, an artist-run space in the financial district, features recent paintings from his “Metaverse Landscape” series alongside sculptures created using whiteboards auctioned by Twitter after Musk took control. The work suggests that internet culture, and by extension our highly networked society, resembles the fantasy landscapes conjured up by Dungeons & Dragons, or ‘The Lord of the Rings’. In other words, technology-enabled life can be conceived as a vast role-playing game, where physical and virtual domains merge, and Musk et al. make the rules. (Denny also curated a current group exhibition at Petzel, featuring like-minded artists exploring fantasy genres with new media such as 3D printing.)
“Dungeon” features a new series of paintings featuring overhead views of various role-playing maps – actual digital prints on canvas, smeared with oil pigment, for a photorealistic but decaying effect. In a rendering of a HeroQuest board, gray, blue, and green stones simmer in the blocky darkness like a geometric abstraction. Other paintings deepen the idea of ’dungeon’: a nasty figure eight is the board for a Hannah Montana version of the tabletop game Mall Madness. An enticing iridescent pattern in another painting might be a row of columns or shelves, but the company name Nvidia in the corner tells you it’s actually a graphics card of the kind often adapted for handling cryptocurrency transactions.
Denny’s skeptical view of the tech industry in “Dungeon” is a bit obvious; it becomes deeper when viewing the show at Dunkunsthalle, where the “Metaverse Landscapes” depict virtual real estate. One smooth earth-toned map marks a waterfront plot. Others resemble pixelated blueprints of streets and storefronts.
The idea of metaverse “landscapes” plays on the history of landscape paintings, which in Europe historically served as a boast of royal possessions, and in the United States as an advertisement for westward expansion, using (false, romantic) images of virgin wilderness were offered for the taking. . By including the metaverse in this line, Denny underlines the bleak fact that today’s land grabs are often not about actual land. So many people can’t afford a real home that the idea of investing in a digital lot is a bitter travesty. QR codes on the sides of the works link to blockchain data that tracks the current owners of these weightless packages. The visual charm of the paintings is second only to the intoxicating allure of owning a painting of someone else’s virtual property, and that, as Denny seems to emphasize, this canvas image is essentially the more real of the two.
Denny doesn’t push artistic style in new directions so much as he studies the aesthetics of the tech industry. Part of his 2015 fair-style exhibition at MoMA PS1 in Queens featured replicas of objects seized during the spectacular downfall of Kim Dotcom, also known as Kim Schmitz, a German-Finnish internet entrepreneur. Included was a huge statue of a Predator from the science fiction action films. Denny’s previous show at Petzel, in 2021, was about an Amazon patent for a comically spherical delivery drone.
When you look at these objects in the full light of reality, the aesthetics of technology look a bit sloppy. But the toy-like silliness of the future shouldn’t make us laugh, Denny suggests – it should make us nervous.
There’s also a sword at Petzel: On the other side of the room, next to the T-shirt shrine, hangs a replica of Anduril, an Elven sword from “The Lord of the Rings,” which Denny made from coffee-tinted resin. It is based on the sword of Palmer Luckey, the defense contractor and inventor of the Oculus Rift virtual reality headset (he sold the company he founded to Facebook for $2 billion). Luckey once – as a joke – modified a headset with explosives so that if your avatar dies in a game, you die in real life. He also founded a defense technology company, Anduril Industries. (Several of his partners in that venture came from the big data company Palantir, also named after a “Lord of the Rings” treasure.)
That a VR guru would create very real military drones and robot sentries, under the brand name of an imaginary weapon, does not inspire confidence. This also applies to the slogan, which at Petzel is depicted on a shadowy UV print with an image of one of Anduril’s autonomous fighter jets: “Fight Unfair.”
Is it all a game for these digital pioneers? Do they know where virtual reality ends and… “meat room” begins? Denny reminds us that the more connected our lives are, the more the rules of technology bind our fantasies.
Dungeon
Through March 30, Petzel Gallery, 35 East 67th Street, Manhattan; 212-680-9467, petzel.com.
Read Write own
Through March 31, Dunkunsthalle, 64 Fulton Street, Lower Manhattan; 917-382-4744, dunkunsthalle.com.