Hugh Davies. Juried Artist
SAE
SAE
Artist Statement
Existing throughout history and culture, in both sacred and profane contexts, games and computation devices intersect and co-evolve, serving not only to entertain, but also to provide alternate histories and clairvoyant predictions into distant futures. Games and calculators are thus time machines that collapse spatial and temporal horizons into an everywhen. This media archeological installation explores these overlapping genealogies of computation, divination, and games.
The key element of the installation is the Go game board which – in different historical eras – has operated as an abacus, a divinatory device, a game, a computer, and inspiration for the QR code. This installation traces the evolution from the Go board to the abacus, to the computer to evoke the globally shared cultural heritage of games as divinatory devices. It works to remind us that before computer games, games were computers.
While the contemporary phenomenon of videogames and digital computation has narrowed understandings of games, this installation opens-up the playful interactive poetics of fortune telling within contemporary and ancient games to highlight enduring motivations to access deep knowledge and temporal truths.
About the artists
Hugh Davies is an artist, curator, and researcher. Working across academic scholarship and creative practice, he explores the social, cultural, and political dimensions of art and technology. In the past decade, his practice has focused on games and practices of play across the Asia Pacific region, resulting in multiple books, papers, and exhibitions. He is currently a research fellow in Chinese Platform Studies at RMIT University, where he teaches Popular Culture. Davies also teaches Mobile Game Development at Nanjing College of Information Technology, Professional Communication at the Singapore Institute of Management, and serves as president of the Chinese Digital Games Research Association (CDiGRA).
Credits: Hugh Davies