EXHIBITION 15th Jul 30th Jan Democracy for the Digital Image 1972-2003 Etopia Center for Art and Technology Atari, Ralph Baer, Bally Industries, Manuel Barbadillo, Nolan Bushnell, Edwin Catmull, Jack P. Citron, Coleco, Computer Technique Group Japan, Viking Eggeling, William Fetter, Lee Harrison III, Kenneth Knowlton, Magnavox, Nelson L. Max, Nintendo, A. Michael Noll, Microsoft, Milton Bradley, Manfred Mohr, Fred Parke, Tony Pritchett, Sega, Ivan Sutherland, StanVanderBeek, John Whitney, Edward Zajac. consolasimagendigital.org Etopia Center for Art and Technology inaugurates an ambitious project on game consoles, video games and the digital image. From 15 July 2020, Etopia_ Center for Art and Technology will host the exhibition and cultural project Consoles: Democratising the digital image 1972-2003 (Consolas, democratizar la imagen digital 1972-2003), the largest exhibition ever held in Spain on the history of digital image, video games and game consoles. Curated for Zaragoza City Council by the renowned art and new media essayist Abraham San Pedro, the project embraces an impressive collection of more than one hundred consoles on display. Each console tells the story of its specific technological, economic, social, artistic, cultural and political context (lebenslage). T o help them fully understand the revolution in the digital image brought about by game consoles, visitors can explore a selection of the foundational masterpieces of early computer art created by the foremost artists in historical digital art. Most of these works have never been exhibited previously in Spain or even elsewhere in Europe. One striking discovery to be made is the raw military origin of the digital image and its subsequent evolution through the technological, scientific and artistic milestones that foreshadowed the emergence of video games. From that moment on, users go on a journey along the archaeological time line of game consoles and the digital images they were capable of producing and showing on screen, within the bounds of each technological generation. The main exhibition lays bare the origins and the early artistic and scientific experiences of the digital image, revealing how its destiny was shaped by the emergence of the game console, a democratising force that broke into the market from 1972 onwards. Due to its origins in warfare and the vast cost of mainframe computers, in its first decades of existence the digital image had been confined to the purposes of warfare, technology and science; it was only later that it drew the attention of artists. Consoles: Democratising the digital image 1972-2003 will thus reveal a selection of major audiovisual works – military, scientific and artistic – that aidcomprehension of the context in which video games came into being. Following this fully rounded aesthetic and technological lead-in, the exhibition features a rigorous selection of the game consoles that rose to prominence during the period 1972-2003: from the first console in history (Magnavox Odyssey, 1972) to the best-selling console ever made (Sony PlayStation 2, 2001). Visitors will also watch video games being played natively – not through a present-day emulator – on the real consoles that existed in each historical period. With this project, Etopia_ engages with a new insight that is not recognised even today: that video games are cultural artefacts wrapped in a political, intellectual, artistic and social raiment, showing how knowledge is produced in our time. Throughout the exhibition period, therefore, Etopia_ will host three pop-up exhibitions in which video games are treated, and hencedisplayed, exactly as if already officially enshrined as Art. The first of the shows,Geometric: Visual Synthesis as an Accidental Avant Garde (Geométricos. La síntesis visual como vanguardia involuntaria), running from 15 July to 26 September 2020, approaches the video game as an aesthetic experience that is manifestly abstract and radically Cubist, and thus tied to the historical avant garde of the 20th century. The second stage, Non-Places: Configuration of Spaces in Video Games (No lugares. Configuración de los espacios en el videojuego), to be held from 30 September to 28 November 2020, deals with how, over the past fifty years of technological development, there have been many different ways of creating the fictional space experience as a setting for representational interactions. Finally, from 2 December 2020 to 30 January 2021, Activism: Changing the World through Video Games (Activismo. Transformando el mundo a través del videojuego) will invite us to explore the widely diverse strategies inscribed in video games – whether express or implied – to seduce us into modifying world visions and personal behaviour. The exhibition Consoles: Democratising the digital image 1972-2003, which will run at Etopia until 30 January 2021, will provide an extensive programme of parallel activities for all audiences: lectures by prominent specialists in the digital image and art, such as Karin Ohlenschläger, Roberta Bosco and Pau Alsina, prestigious psychiatrists such as José Miguel Gaona; experts in artificial intelligence such asPedro Antonio González Calero; and video game specialists such as Marçal Mora and Eurídice Cabañes. The exhibition venue will also host video game workshops for children and young people and screenings of recent games and cinematics that, though not yet recognised as cinematography, use the language of film. The façades of the Etopia building will be lit up with 21 visual pieces created by the curator and the artist Néstor Lizalde specifically for this project. The temporary exhibition space, moreover, will provide interaction points where visitors can play on game consoles or consult selected books and documentation on the digital image and video games. Consoles: Democratising the digital image 1972-2003 is a project directed by the Spanish new media art curator Abraham San Pedro for Zaragoza City Council at Etopia Center for Art and Technology. The exhibition is part of smARTplaces, an audience development venture co-funded by the Creative Europe Programme of the European Union. Azkuna Zentroa-Alhóndiga Bilbao is a production partner of the shows. Permanent exhibition/Curatorial statement The digital image is our ecosystem. It is now a natural part of everyday life (lebenslage). Tablets, advertising, social media, political campaigns, smartphones, art, news, photography, science, fashion... today any surface or device is fed by a relentless and transparent flow of digital images. This is a radical historical departure. A departure from “reality” (lebenswelt). For now reality dematerialises and translates into encrypted data and thus becomes questionable as truth. An image, when dissolved in mathematical code, becomes hidden and hence changeable. Our perception of “the real” becomes liquid, fluid, One-dimensional. Moreover, the virtualisation of cosmovision (weltanschauung) conjures up entire new worlds: immaterial, alternative, imagined universes running on code and algorithm. Like video games. The social and technological process that drives the prevailing hegemony of the synthetic image involves several actors, who are diverse, shifting, and sometimes conflicting. Game consoles play a key role – in fact, a central role – in this cultural dynamic. Despite their apparent banality and levity – they are just “games”, after all – video games have proved to be a vigorous technical and historical force. Video games encouraged a constant push to develop new and more powerful image processors – thus speeding up the history of computing and becoming one of the core vectors towards our current hyper-technological society. The role of video games in the construction of digital society does not end here: it was game consoles that democratised the digital image. Through games, the novelty of the digital image, hitherto almost a mere anecdote on the margins of engineering, grew, thrived, penetrated the culture and finally took hold, reshaping the patterns of the visible, its forms, its signs and symbols, and its meanings: the storytelling of the present (The Social Construction of Reality). Game consoles have been a powerful force for historic change. Now, with this interdisciplinary selection embracing the foundational audiovisual works and documents of the birth of the computer-generated image and all the significant game consoles from 1972 to 2003, visitors can retrace the steps of this thrilling story. We shall see how war, science, technology, industry, leisure and art are intertwined and travel along the same track, conjoined by a desire to enhance the mimetic sophistication of the real that underpins the evolution of the digital image. Final stop: the appearance of being real. Without this reckoning of events we cannot, in the end, understand the how and why of the digital society we are now. The history of computing is tightly bound up with war and its industry. During the Second World War, the first steps were taken with the construction of supercomputers such as “ENIAC” (United States, 1943) and the two “Colossus” machines (United Kingdom, 1943-1945). After the atomic disaster came the Cold War: a system of global confrontation overshadowed by the threat of a nuclear apocalypse provoked by the enemy. In this new world order of relations strained almost to breaking-point, vast budgets were fed into technological research and development. Multidisciplinary teams were formed (mathematicians, psychologists, military officers,