In a typical cyber gaming club, customers, as physically existing human beings, step literally into the tangible architectural space of the gaming room, and then, with the help of highly material equipment based on electronic technologies, manipulate the virtual digital program products in predefined ways, and eventually move towards the abstract mental imagination.
Such a pattern, transitioning from tangible experience to virtual encounter, engendering comprehensive sensory digital feedback encompassing visual and auditory stimuli, thereby fostering psychological extension and entertainment, differs from the traditional physical amusement mode of using physical games to generate authentic material feedback and obtaining physical target objects, essentially only in the material attributes of the ultimate acquisitions.
The exhibition, by embedding physical gaming modalities within the cyber gaming club and utilizing dual-natured digital artworks as the ultimate target objectives, endows participants with multifaceted identities as players, spectators, and game characters, seeks to juxtapose and compare the similarities and differences between the two modes of entertainment, thereby redefining the relation between consumers and the consumed within modern entertainment mediums.
In such a paradigm, the exhibition also subtly alludes to the hidden mechanisms of production and control underlying both digital and material entertainment, amplified through the intervention of generative artificial intelligence, where the virtual human figures, iterated from virtual programs produced by digital commands from humans, reflect the essence of human beings and digital programs to generate cognition and receive feedback.
Androids in cyber gaming club? This interrogative title echoes the explorations and questions regarding artificial intelligence that began decades ago, and by revisiting the connections and contrasts between the material versus the nonmaterial, consuming versus being consumed, and controlling versus being controlled, the exhibition ultimately aims to unveil the virtual from the real within the physical world, and the real from the virtual of the digital realm.