MU | Strijp S

Art & Arcade

If you are a gaming addict and an art freak, MU is THE place to be for you this April and May. Art & Arcade, a collection of ten gaming classics that have been given an artistic overhaul, is coming straight to Eindhoven from the Haus für Elektronische Künste in Basel where it premiered.

Arcade video machines never go out of style. In the 1970s the first entertainment arcades appeared, the so-called Penny Arcades. As their name implies, they would spring to life after insertion of a coin. For decades these arcade games flourished, and classic games were developed and marketed for them, such as Pong, Space Invaders, Mario Bros, Tron Pac-Man and Donkey Kong.

Having grown up with these games it was inevitable that these visual artists would start using the arcade games in their work. They are restructuring the video games, fitting them with new functions, creating fantasy worlds and experimenting with 8-bit aesthetics to transform the gaming culture into art.

MU | Strijp S will be transformed into a gaming arcade where you can indulge yourself with games such as Painstation, Pentapong, The Machine, Radical ATM Service, Tesla Arcade, Cage was a n00b and Racer.

Guest curator: Alain Bieber

Participating artists: //////////fur//// art entertainment interfaces | Canedo, Maingardt & Hartmann | Hussein Chalayan | Djeff | Iván Kozenitzky, Federico Lazcano | JODI | MOBILESKINO | Evan Roth | Haas, Wellershoff & Winter | Andreas Ullrich / C.Rockefeller Art Investment Group

What’s more, to offer some opportunities for a magical escape amid all this artistically sound gaming mayhem, MU is also hosting an impressive four-part video installation and a series of graphic works by the Chinese artist Yang Yongliang, as well as an interactive installation by the young Dutch artist Bram Snijders/DEFRAME. Both create black-and-white worlds that explore the grey area between the old and the new, the real and the virtual.

Solo Yang Yongliang

Yang Yongliang (Shanghai, 1980) attempts to fuse traditional Chinese culture with contemporary digital techniques. He has developed a unique animated style of digital panorama collages in which China’s fast-paced urban development blends with the tranquil scenery of traditional landscape paintings.

In his work the viewer encounters what at first sight looks like majestic black and white Chinese landscape painting. Looking closer, the observant onlooker will discover that the jagged surface of the rocky mountains is actually composed of densely-stacked concrete buildings. The result is a depiction in which nature that once served as a way for ancient poets to find inner peace is taken over by the realities of 21st century Chinese city life and its congestion, flashy billboards, and high rises.

At MU Yang Yongliang will show two recent video works and a new graphic collage. www.yangyongliang.com

Solo Bram Snijders/DEFRAME

To be Reproduced (after Magritte), 2014

‘To be Reproduced’ by the young Dutch artist Bram Snijders (1984) is an interactive video installation that revisits the classic 1937 painting ‘Not to be Reproduced’ by the Belgian surrealist painter René Magritte. The installation reflects on the pervasiveness of virtual spaces that have become an integral part of our daily social lives.

In To be Reproduced the viewer enters a hybrid space where the boundary between the physical and the virtual world becomes highly blurred. The viewer finds himself standing in reality but sees a kind of life-size digital shadow of himself in the virtual space before him. This digital reproduction of the viewer follows every movement precisely. But the mirror image also stays uncannily faceless because he is only seen from the back. It is as if he were moving a few feet in front of the viewer in a graphical point cloud. www.deframe.nl

Opening April 18, 8pm