Easel Engine

Part of Museum Without Walls: MoMI x Tezos

Artists are increasingly repurposing tools and environments created for video game production—including engines, software, and hardware—while often choosing to omit interactivity. The five artists in this series have established practices employing techniques such as ROM corruption, 3D asset creation, custom dithering algorithms, and subversion of in-game creative tools—like The Sims’ Easel function—to create artworks that invite contemplation in exchange for play. This series of video works span a multi-generational evolution of digital graphics, from early 1-bit constraints to complex three-dimensional models. By removing the expectation of hands-on interaction, each featured work invites viewers to engage with video game aesthetics from new perspectives. A more passive approach encourages deeper reflection on gaming’s visual language and narrative interpretations, revealing artistic merits that might be overlooked during active gameplay. The integration of video game elements into artistic practice highlights the medium’s pervasive cultural impact. And by appropriating and recontextualizing gaming’s visual language and technologies in nonutilitarian formats, these works offer new perspectives on how these tools can be transformed into vehicles for both creative expression and rumination.

ON VIEW JUNE 28–JULY 25, 2024:
Sabato Visconti
b. 1985, Brazilian
b a r b i e ~ w o r l d ~ b r e a k d o w n, 2024
Digital video. 3 mins 10 secs, loop.

By the early ’90s, video game marketing strategies predominantly targeted masculine interests, often sidelining more diverse audiences. Barbie: Super Model, released for Sega Genesis, SNES, and MS-DOS, emerged as a significant title that defied these norms, challenging the marketing-driven narrative that video games were exclusively of interest to a single gender. Sabato Visconti’s work, featuring ROM corruptions from the SNES version of the console game, critiques this history of narrow, gendered marketing practices through reverence for the 1993 release. Reflecting marketing influence and gender role definition in the gaming industry that persists to this day, the work also mirrors contemporary political tensions. Initiated in 2016 amid global political upheaval, the series features glitched moments, depicting the digital world disintegrating around the protagonist as she attempts to maintain composure.

Mint Sabato Visconti’s Open Edition for Easel Engine here until July 25th!

Sabato Visconti is a Brazilian new media artist and photographer based in Western Massachusetts. Sabato graduated from Amherst College in 2009 with a degree in Political Science and began experimenting with glitch processes in 2011 with the help of a defective memory card that randomly wrote zeroes onto JPEG files. Since then, Sabato has sought to interrogate imaging practices that have become absorbed by digital processes, hybridized media, online networks, and machine intelligence—technologies that have also enabled apparatuses for social conditioning, mass surveillance, and necropolitics, through works that captures the plight of the subject in the face of environmental turbulence driven by systems designed to fail and malfunction. 

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