The whimsical twist of internet-charged culture produces more main characters, arcanes, and relics than we can handle. Remember when the Canadian musician known as Grimes — the former partner of one of the most powerful men in the world, tech entrepreneur Elon Musk — brought a sword to the 2021 Met Gala? The image of a futuristic pop star wielding a medieval blade (made from a melted-down AR-15, no less) on the red carpet sums up the mysterious way modern culture seems to run in all directions, chasing myths both young and old. old ones.
Simon Denny, an artist based in Berlin, creates sculptures, installations, videos and prints inspired by the aesthetics of technology companies. In two simultaneous shows in Manhattan he has seized omens like the blade to explore the sociopolitical implications of the tech industry’s taste for medieval tradition. According to Denny’s, dreams of wizards and blacksmiths, dark forests and dark castles shape the newest digital realms.
“Dungeon,” Denny’s fifth show with New York’s Petzel Gallery, presents Grimes with a kind of surprise: Puffs from an automatic steamer inflate a black “Game of Thrones” T-shirt that once belonged to the star, placed in a case of plexiglass like armor. The sculpture is plugged into a power strip that Denny procured from a Twitter clearance sale during his Musk-ordered X transition.
Downtown, “Read Write Own,” Denny’s first show with Dunkunsthalle, an artist-run space in the financial district, offers recent paintings from his “Metaverse Landscape” series alongside sculptures made with auctioned whiteboards from Twitter after Musk took the reins. The work suggests that Internet culture, and by extension our highly networked society, resembles the fantasy landscapes evoked by Dungeons & Dragons or The Lord of the Rings. Technological augmented life, in other words, can be understood as a vast role-playing game, in which physical and virtual realms merge, and Musk et al. make the rules. (Denny also curated a current group show at Petzel featuring like-minded artists exploring fantasy genres with new media like 3D printing.)
“Dungeon” features a new series of paintings featuring top-down views of various RPG maps — actually digital prints on canvas, smeared with oil pigment for a photorealistic yet decaying effect. In a rendering of a HeroQuest board, gray, blue and green bricks simmer in total darkness like a geometric abstraction. Other paintings deepen the “dungeon” idea: A smudged figure eight is the painting for a Hannah Montana-branded version of the Mall Madness board game. A striking iridescent pattern on another table could be rows of columns or shelves, but the Nvidia company name in the corner tells you that it’s actually a graphics card of the kind often adapted to handle cryptocurrency transactions.
Denny’s skeptical view of the tech industry in “Dungeon” is a little obvious. deepens when viewing the show at the Dunkunsthalle, where “Metaverse Landscapes” depict virtual real estate. A smooth earth-toned map accentuates a “seaside” lot. Others look like pixelated blueprints of streets and storefronts.
The idea of metamorphic “landscapes” plays on the history of landscapes, which in Europe historically served as bragging rights for royal possessions, and in the United States as advertisements for westward expansion, offering (false, romantic) images of unspoiled wilderness for the taking. . By including the metaverse in this genealogy, Denny highlights the grim fact that today’s land grabs often do not involve actual land. So many people can’t afford a real house that the idea of investing in a digital plot of land is a bitter mockery. QR codes on the sides of the project link to blockchain entries that track the current owners of these weightless parcels. The visual appeal of the paintings is second only to the heady attraction of owning a painting of someone else’s virtual property, and that, as Denny seems to point out, this canvas image is, fundamentally, the more real of the two.
Denny isn’t pushing art style in new directions so much as studying the aesthetics of the tech industry. Part of the 2015 exhibit at MoMA PS1 in Queens featured replicas of items seized in the spectacular downfall of Kim Dotcom, aka Kim Schmitz, a German-Finnish Internet entrepreneur. Included was a huge statue of a Predator from the sci-fi action movies. Denny’s previous show at Petzel, in 2021, was about an Amazon patent for a comic bulbous drone.
Viewing these objects in the full light of reality, the aesthetics of technology seem a little dull. But the playful silliness of the future shouldn’t make us laugh, Denny suggests—it should unnerve us.
There’s also a sword in Petzel: Across the room from the blouse shrine hangs a replica of Anduril, an elven blade from “The Lord of the Rings,” that Denny fashioned from coffee-dyed resin. It’s based on the sword owned by Palmer Luckey, the defense contractor and inventor of the Oculus Rift virtual reality headset (he sold the company he founded to Facebook for $2 billion). Luckey once modified a headset — as a joke — with explosives so that if your avatar dies in a game, you die in real life. He also founded a defense technology company, Anduril Industries. (Several of his partners in this venture came from the big data company Palantir, which was also named after the Lord of the Rings treasure.)
That a virtual reality guru would make very real military drones and robotic guards, branded with a fictional weapon, does not inspire confidence. Neither is the tagline, emblazoned on the Petzel in a shadowy UV print depicting one of Anduril’s autonomous fighter jets: “Fight Unfair.”
Is it all a game for these digital pioneers? Do they know where virtual reality ends and meatspace begins? Denny reminds us that the more networked our lives become, the more the rules of technology bind our imaginations.
Dungeon
Through March 30, Petzel Gallery, 35 East 67th Street, Manhattan. 212-680-9467, petzel.com.
Read Write mine
Through March 31, Dunkunsthalle, 64 Fulton Street, Lower Manhattan. 917-382-4744, dunkunsthalle.com.
