New Genres (2018)
Site-specific VR installation
New Genres is a site-specific VR installation set in a former WWII bunker in Nuremberg. Making references to the popular first-person shooter game Call of Duty, the installation aims to sensitise viewers to the codifications of fascist motifs in gaming environments and to connect these with the the post-war reconstruction of Nuremberg’s historic city centre, which replicated Nazi-era architectural interventions aimed at consolidating a fabricated altdeutsche past.
Augmenting the VR simulation, two texts by the art historian Kerstin Stakemeier and Kirschner call attention to contemporary manifestations of fascism and seek possible exit strategies. For, as Félix Guattari stressed in his 1973 lecture Everybody Wants to be a Fascist: "what fascism set in motion yesterday continues to proliferate in other forms, within the complex of contemporary social space."
3D Model: William Fairbrother
Programmer: Mike Poleshaw
Texts: Kerstin Stakemeier and Kirschner
