Omoiyari © Keiken X Gabriel Massan, 2022. Installation view at The Photographers’ Gallery, London. Curated in collaboration with Zaiba Jabbar. Courtesy of the artists. Photo: Ollie Harrop.

Every system contains within itself the seeds of its own transcendence

As digital infrastructures increasingly shape not only our environments but also the architectures of subjectivity itself, Console Spirituality, curated by Vienna Kim and Benoît Palop (LAN Party) for Feral File, emerges as a precise, almost liturgical inquiry into the threshold where gaming logic, speculative worldbuilding, and technological ritual converge. This is not merely an exhibition about video games; it is a meditation on how interactive systems have come to inform new modes of transcendence within the networked condition.

Video games have long outgrown their status as escapist entertainment. They function as alternate ontological zones—spaces where gravity is negotiable, where identity is recombinant, and where the laws governing reality itself can be reprogrammed. Through this, they propose speculative iterations of existence: futures that destabilize the very terms by which we have come to understand reality. Within this expanded terrain, gaming becomes less an activity than an epistemological framework, an engine of world-construction, narrative experimentation, and spiritual inquiry.

The works brought together in Console Spirituality form not a series of isolated meditations, but rather a cohesive system, a constellation where each practice extends and complicates the others, tracing overlapping trajectories through the unstable field of post-digital subjectivity.

In Dungeoneer, John Provencher revisits one of gaming culture’s most enduring memes—“Can it run Doom?”—to construct a generative act of collecting and co-producing. Each unique dungeon map—embedding both navigable space and visual artifact into a single procedural form—is available for collecting, inviting an active role in shaping the work’s trajectory. The gesture becomes performative; ownership becomes participatory; exhibition becomes iterative. Provencher doesn’t simply reference Doom—a founding text of digital gaming—but redirects its cultural inertia toward a reflection on the mechanics of exhibition-making, the destabilization of authorship, and the gamification of collecting itself.

Where Provencher invokes the structural language of systems, Sabato Visconti ventures into their fractures. In Angelcores & Heavenly Sprites, Visconti traverses the broken landscapes of retro gaming, repurposing titles such as ActRaiser, Legendary Wings, Spiritual Warfare, and Wings of Wor as sites of technological failure and spiritual apparition. Here, the glitch is not simply a technical malfunction but a metaphysical rupture, an encrypted form of revelation, an aesthetic of the sacred emerging from systemic collapse.

Drawing from the politics of modding, hacking, and queer coding practices, Visconti situates glitch aesthetics within the critical discourse of Legacy Russell’s Glitch Feminism and Rosa Menkman’s Glitch Studies Manifesto, transforming error into a deliberate strategy of dissent, destabilization, and alternative cosmology.

Emi Kusano’ s Data Pilgrims approaches spirituality through a different kind of traversal, one shaped by AI collaboration and the ambient poetics of walking simulators. Her anonymous figures meander through fragmented, contemplative landscapes inhabited by spirit animals and digital deities, where movement itself becomes the ritual. Without the teleology of winning or losing, Kusano’s environments offer instead a meditative digital liturgy, ritualized navigation through algorithmically glitched architectures, where contemplation displaces conquest, and code performs as prayer.

This negotiation between the intimate and the systemic continues in the collaborative project Omoiyari by Keiken and Gabriel Massan, where avatars inhabit liminal states of memory and disembodiment. Figures such as Uxkme, hovering between recollection and oblivion, and Xibam, aware of their own spectral distance, stage tender confrontations with the instability of selfhood.

Originally presented as AR posters in London’s Soho, these works subvert the visual tropes of video game advertising, replacing commercial seduction with subtle meditations on affect, care, and relational ethics. Anchored in the Japanese principle of omoiyari (compassion), they ask what tenderness might look like within economies of desire, circulation, and digital spectacle.

Together, these works do not offer a unified theory of the sacred in digital culture, but rather a shifting diagram—a speculative cartography of what might be called the digital sacred: a space where identity is not fixed but constantly assembled and disassembled; where code becomes narration; where systemic rupture offers a pathway to spiritual inversion.

Parallel to Console Spirituality, Feral File’s summer programming, presented in partnership with Rhizome—continues with Net Evil (opening August 26), curated by Mackenzie Davenport, which reconsiders the seven deadly sins through the architecture of the contemporary internet. Once again, Feral File positions itself less as an online platform than as a living inquiry into the infrastructures of networked culture—its contradictions, failures, and emergent mythologies.

Founded in 2020 by Casey Reas and Sean Moss-Pultz, Feral File continues to operate as one of the most advanced curatorial laboratories for digital-native art. In its hands, exhibition-making becomes a systemic act: not simply a mode of presentation, but a recursive experiment in how artworks, audiences, and algorithms co-produce each other.

Because ultimately, as Console Spirituality quietly proposes, video games may no longer be just systems we inhabit. They may have already become altars upon which the very meaning of being human is continuously rewritten.

Full exhibition

Console Spirituality

Curated by: Vienna Kim、Benoît Palop（LAN Party）

Exhibition Opening: June 24, 2025, at 17:00 (UTC+0)

Artists: John Provencher、Emi Kusano、Sabato Visconti、Keiken & Gabriel Massan

Fw.