December 17th, 2014 - February 8th, 2015 No Pain No Game

02.01.2015 — tklick
Friday, 2015, January 2 (All day)
December 17th, 2014 - February 8th, 2015 No Pain No Game

A computer game that punishes mistakes with real pain. The world’s smallest social network. Balls activated – as if by some ghostly hand – via singing. A pinball machine played with steel bullets at eye level. Volker Morawe and Tilman Reiff’s multisensory artifacts form a counter-proposition to the massively advancing isolation of electronic input-output device users. no pain no game, the artist duo’s world première exhibition, presents ten selected works that in various ways invite interaction. The exhibition was commissioned from //////////fur//// by the Goethe Institute as part of the PLAY INSTINCT! project.

The work of Köln artist duo //////////fur//// (V. Morawe, T. Reiff) moves in the space between art and play, media criticism and entertainment. //////////fur//// prefers to make art physically tangible – and that, on the far side of the viewer’s comfort zone. On display, among other works, is the duo’s classic PainStation – an interactive game installation that combines a retro-style computer game with physical pain. Even if the other works shown provoke less drastic feelings, what they have in common is that mere observation will not suffice to experience them fully. Only visitors are able to summon up enough courage will be able to, at least for a time, become part of the installation. It is only in direct contact that a certain built-in humor often also comes to light, when interfaces appearing familiar at first glance behave completely differently than expected...

Volker Morawe, 44, and Tilman Reiff, 43: the former from Bremen, previously a space electronics specialist and producer of musical hits; the latter, from Munich, an IT specialist focusing on interface design. The two met in 2001 at the Kunsthochschule für Medien in Köln, and since then have been creating extraordinary installations that not only invite play, but also – above all – go against the grain of media interaction mechanisms.

Their works provoke and enthrall, and have won prestigious international awards, including the Japan Media Arts Award (2003), an Ars Electronica honorable mention (2002) and the International Media Art Award of the ZKM Center for Art and Media Karlsruhe (2003). Numbering among their international exhibition venues are the MOCA in Shanghai, the Art Fair in Köln, the Yerba Center for the Arts in San Francisco, MoMA in New York and many others.