The exhibition is a game!!!!!
A game where physical, fictional and digital worlds merge. There are three “Hosts” vying for your attention and with whom you can connect. Scan the respective QR code with your phone – a window will open – and take control of the hosts. They will speak out loud (and post on the Discord chat portal) what you write in the text box.
How to play the game
- Please buy a game ticket for 5 Euro at the cash desk or in the shop. With it you register at the game terminals but also at Hand of Vengeance or Tax Roulette.
- Watch the episodes of Screen Talk (at least a few) and the videos on the monitors. In the movies you will find the answers to quiz questions, which you will need later in the gaming zone at the three game terminals.
- Design your own “Hand of Vengeance”: you can enter a text and push the color sliders and create your own compositions. Press “mint” to save the image. When you reach 40 points or more in the game, you can buy your own image and transfer it to your Crypto Wallet. The exhibition works with the NFT platform objkt.com and the cryptocurrency Tezoz, a possible wallet app for it is kukai (kukai.app).
- Visit Cheat Island: the motifs on the ground are valuable keys to quiz questions!!!!
- Play the game terminals. The order is arbitrary and does not affect the outcome of the game. For each correctly solved task you get points, for each wrong answer there is a point deduction!
- You do not have to participate in Tax Roulette, but you can possibly reduce the tax rate of 50%, which is still deducted from your gaming balance. With good luck, you will be exempt from tax or get a lower tax rate. With bad luck, you will lose your entire gaming balance. No risk, no fun!
- Before you leave the exhibition, check your score at one of the two QR code scanners (one each at the entrance and exit of the exhibition) – you may have won!!!!
There are silkscreen prints by Neïl Beloufa worth 75 / 500 / 1.500 Euro to win and NFT’s.
HAVE FUN!!
You have to play to fully experience the exhibition! Please buy your required game ticket* at the ticket desk or in our shop to support the project of this exhibition’s creators by playing. It’s about being part of something and having fun—plus you can win art!
Screen Talk, Cheat Island, Console of Quiz, Press Key Port, Hand of Vengeance, Tax Haven Roulette, and Souvenir Shop: these are the various stations of Pandemic Pandemonium. In fact, the whole exhibition is a kind of walk-on game board: the visitors move from zone to zone, gathering information and clues for the quiz questions and small challenges to be solved at the “gaming machines” where they can try their luck and—with a little dexterity and steady nerves—even win genuine works of art. No need to be scared! The game is humorous and parodic, with the answers hidden in the sixteen episodes of the video installation Screen Talk, and paying a visit to Cheat Island could be prove helpful, too, though those who do might find themselves in an ethical dilemma afterwards.
For visitors who are more interested in crypto art, the exhibition offers them an opportunity to colorize the digital template Hand of Vengeance to their liking. They can then buy the picture in the form of an NFT (non-fungible token) and stash it in their personal crypto wallets.
The exhibition is an immersive installation comprising videos, sculptures, animated objects, interactive elements, home-built gaming consoles, and works of digital art. A characteristic feature of Beloufa’s shows is that they mix existing and new works, recombining diverse elements in a scenario that is designed to be confusing rather than conveying an unequivocal message. His work alludes to tendencies in society and politics, to social inequality, venture capitalism, and the crypto economy, to an internet dominated by algorithms and concentrations of power in the physical and virtual worlds. At the same time, the exhibition toys with the utopian and visionary ideals behind Web3—the self-empowering vision of an internet without power centers and the possibilities it opens up for everyone.
In Pandemic Pandemonium, Beloufa continues his insistent interrogation of the art field, its institutions and formats, media and technologies, capacities and limitations. He is known for his critical stances, experimental openness, and ongoing search for alternative solutions as well as his preference for collective practices. Over the past more than two years, the pandemic with all the complications it has caused—numerous exhibitions had to be canceled or postponed—has prompted many artists to shift their practices to a more sustainable footing; some, Beloufa among them, have explored creative alternatives in the digital virtual universe. Turning to playful interactive formats (gaming) and studying crypto art and phenomena such as NFTs, he has expanded his collaborative field and recently founded the production company EBB, which describes itself as follows:
“EBB& is a node and platform for the distribution of cultural experiences and products specializing in the use of Web3 solutions: blockchain, NFT, and new community tokenization projects …” (see the website at ebb.global).
In Pandemic Pandemonium, Beloufa and EBB intertwine at least two themes or plot strands to bridge the gulf between the real-world exhibition gallery and the seemingly endless virtual universe. One is the subject of the pandemic and the reality of (global) pandemic management; the other is the exploration of novel forms of community that have emerged from Web3 projects in the centerless internet based on peer-to-peer structures.
The question of the pandemic looms largest in the work Screen Talk, while the artist’s engagement with aspects of the crypto economy that are contentious even as some hype them as visionary and utopian comes to the fore in the three “Master Hosts” and the NFT station Hand of Vengeance.
Screen Talk, with which the exhibition opens, actually dates from 2014: a parody of trashy soap operas originally titled Home Is Wherever I’m with You with a plot about a global pandemic (!), the hunt for a cure, ostensible personal sacrifices and crises, and interpersonal communication restricted to computer screens. In the course of the Covid-19 pandemic, these “screen talks” became common reality for many of us. That also made the work newly relevant to Beloufa, and he worked with EBB to adapt it under the title Screen Talk. The film became a series of mini-episodes, to which they added programmed interactive elements to turn them into an online game that ran as a web-based application during the (actual) pandemic and the lockdowns but was also presented at festivals like the 2020 Steirischer Herbst, which was held solely in the digital domain.
The Master Hosts—Host A (blue), Host B (yellow), Host C (red)—are animated interactive sculptures that each come with a dual identity: they exist as objects in real space and as complex cryptological constructions. After the scanning the associated QR code, the visitors can take control of the hosts and make them talk through an input screen (on their smartphones) and text-to-speech software. They also operate their own Twitter and Discord accounts and are, at least in theory, designed as DAOs (Decentral Autonomous Organizations), which puts them squarely at the heart of the crypto cosmos.
For Beloufa and EBB, expanding their sphere of activity into digital realms is not an end in itself but a choice motivated by the need to reach audiences, and young people in particular, where they are—and they are more likely to be gaming online than at an art exhibition.
Pandemic Pandemonium is based on Digital Mourning (Pirelli HangarBicocca, Milan, 2021–22) and is an enlarged version of the exhibition first presented at Clearing, Brussels (2022).
*The proceeds from the ticket sales cover the production costs of the prizes (original silkscreen prints). Visitors should not hesitate to approach the young attendants in the show, who will be happy to assist them.
Get online access to Pandemic Pandemonium, an NFT game by EBB & Neïl Beloufa, available on objkt.com.
Press release from Secession.
