"From the mid to late 1980s I spent a lot of time hanging around videogame arcades in London. I started to think about the games, their structures, their objectives, their themes, their addictiveness. I started to consider their cultural subtexts, antecedents, the effect they may have on society and how they might develop and connect to other mechanisms, developments and fantasies or projections of the future. From 1989 I started making paintings about them and in January 1991 I bought an Amiga computer and made a series of fictional videogame stills using Deluxe Paint II. I photographed them straight from the screen as there was no other way to output them that I knew of apart from through a very primitive daisy wheel printer where they appeared as washed out dots.
The effect of the photographs perfectly reproduced the highly pixellated, raised needlepoint effect of the Amiga screen image. Conceptually this means of presentation was also appropriate in that it made it seem like I had gone into a videogame arcade and photographed the games there, lending authenticity to the fiction.
The first seven works on this page form a series titled, 'Q. Would you recognise a Virtual Paradise?' In 1992 I had experienced the new 'Virtual Reality' game at Segaworld on the top floor of the Trocadero building in Piccadilly Circus in London. This was my first experience with VR. With my head weighed down by an enormous headset and my body surrounded by a padded barrier I entered a chequerboarded square platform in outer space. I found I could walk around this space in any direction. I walked over to the boundary, beyond which was black outer space on all four sides. I tried to jump out into space but that was where the code stopped. There were four staircases rising infinitely upward from the centre of each side of the platform. Alien figures began to descend them and shoot at me. I died several times. Then I used my weapon and killed them. This was it. Perhaps there was another level but the game was so expensive to play I never got there. But the idea of virtual reality set up another series of questions in my mind, ideas of parallel universes and alternate existences from daily life. How, I wondered, would this new technology be implemented and developed, for what and for whom, and what would be its effect on society and the future? In late 1992 I worked on a new Amiga computer series which imagined and questioned the idea of a virtual world, presenting stills from a single imaginary videogame. This series played also on the phenomenon of computer system messages, counterpoised with the cultural fear/fantasy of a technological future paradise.
Many of these works were shown in London at the Edward Totah Gallery in March 1992 (view installation) and later that year at the Exeter Hotel in Adelaide, Australia.
In 1995 the 'Q. Would you recognise a Virtual Paradise?' series was shown in London at the Royal Festival Hall in the exhibition It's a Pleasure, curated by Leah Kharibian.
Recent venues: Somerset House, London, 2018 view installation ; Akron Art Museum, Ohio, USA 2019 and tour; Moderna Museet, Stockholm, Sweden, 2019/20 view installation : 'Elecric Dreams', Tate Modern, London, 2024-5
The original Amiga floppy disks which stored the image files are corrupt, but the photographic art works remain."
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