Leo Castaneda
Region: MFA Annual
Website: http://www.leonardocastaneda.com
My work turns the structures of video gaming into a lens for
analyzing the world. “Levels,” “bosses,” “items,” are words that
dominate virtual entertainment. These labeling systems delineate
and provide hierarchies reminiscent of both ancient mythologies
and corporate structures, while highlighting the arbitrariness
of their boundaries and naming. The work was initially an effort
to gain image freedom in painting, using the notion from video
games of “worlds without justification” (Nick Kelman, VideoGame
Art, 2006, 143), where I could make random images, reconciling
abstraction and representation to create a progression of image
concerns that by default would map a world. With time, the
work has escaped medium-specificity, verging on sculpture,
performance, and virtual reality/videogame design itself, bound
by image and narrative though expressed at a different speed.
Mediums become the interpreters of an arbitrary mythology
that finds purpose and then disintegrates it, only to gain it again,
ideally through the viewer’s identification as protagonist, the most
powerful quality of video-gaming and virtual reality.