'Now Play This' at Somerset House

As technology continues to become increasingly sophisticated and ever-present in all areas of life, the familiar boundaries of digital space are slowly starting to change. For many enthusiasts, gaming is largely considered as a bridge between reality and fictional, fantastical worlds. ‘Now Play This’ is an exhibition that explores the playful nature of gaming against the tangibility of physical spaces and hardware.

Photo courtesy of Somerset House

Presenting audiences with a curated selection of games, playful experiences, and activities with the aim of bridging the distance between art, entertainment, and physicality, 'Now Play This' is a nine-day festival that encourages audiences to interact with the complicated relationships behind creation, inspiration, and fantasy through the pursuit of new experiences coloured by computational implements and digital worlds.

For art director Maria Lujan Oulton, the concept of liminality is at the heart of the exhibition. Described as a 'middle state’ of openness and ambiguity, 'Now Play This' ultimately asks the question: What role does playfulness serve in our daily lives? Ultimately encouraging audiences and creatives to interrogate the transformative powers behind modern entertainment, the role that games play in our daily lives, and conceptions of an increasingly digital future.

Photo courtesy of Somerset House

Situated in Somerset House’s East Wing, the exhibition takes place across a singular hallway with a collection of rooms, each representing different aspects of liminality. Prompting public audiences to interact directly with the exhibition, the mixture of virtual reality technology with physical spaces augmented by elaborate technical set-ups and large screens effectively transforms a traditional artistic space into a digitally enhanced arena.

With conversational AI quickly becoming a new trend in online spaces, ChatGPT is changing the landscape of digital content for better or worse, and as large language models continue to enable the creation of textual content at the press of a finger, the boundaries between the digital world and human creativity have become blurred. In particular, these complicated and fluid boundaries of liminality and our growing digital reality are heavily reflected in ‘From Language to Reality: Rewriting the Tales of 1001 Nights’ produced by Yuqian Sun and Ada Eden.

1001 Nights exemplifies this disconnect between physical reality and digital space through its usage of generative AI (GPT-4 and Stable Diffusion) as a key storytelling element. As players navigate through a rich environment inspired by Persian influences, the power of words is weaponised literally as a method of changing the protagonist Scheherazade’s fate. In Ada’s own words, players are given the freedom to redefine boundaries, crafting stories that surpass authorial constraints and lead to the creation of entirely new realities within the digital world.

Photos by Karan Nimsons

Ultimately, words and stories have the power to shape the world and inform the way we think and the decisions we make as we live our lives in the physical world. And in doing so, 'Now Play This' fulfils its promises of careful introspection and reconsideration by impacting audiences in hidden ways. As traditional boundaries continue to flex and grow more accommodating, the notion of playfulness in the modern age invites us to develop the strength to create a better future, one pixel at a time.

'Now Play This' took place at Somerset House from 6th to the 14th April. To keep up with Somerset House and find out about future events, check their website or follow them on Instagram.