cm 70x100

Lambda print, silicone, plexiglas, dibond

2011

Editions of 3+2, 3 available

"Hi Score Park" is a "leisure area" in the Voom Hotel, the virtual architecture created by Luca Lisci in Second Life. It's an installation maintained inworld by Icon String, of of Lisci's avatars.

"Leisure" must be understood in a peculiar way: rows and rows of dead bodies covered by white shrouds are lying at the bottom of the sea. "They are electronic shrouds - explains Lisci - under which lie Icon Strings' brothers, killed by videogame wars. Icon is a war veteran." The shrouds, if you zoom on them, reveal the corpses probably have the shapes of Alien Invaders or similar '80s shooter games bots.

With this work, Lisci mixes different languages (videogame derived pop and the rhetoric of tragedy) to create an eerie and sophisticated landscape. "Hi Score Park" inspires interesting thoughts about our own relationship with digital entertainment: Second Life residents are in a sense "war veterans" of the eighties mass culture, which was overloaded with digital excesses. Everybody agrees on the influences of that orgy of colour on today's visual culture. It is much more difficult to accept that the '80s videogame frenzy also contained an element of loneliness and "madness", which has been redeemed by today's multiplayer online gaming experiences.

[ Go to the page of Luca Lisci ]

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