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Laguna Beach Art Museum ‘Wows’ Us Again

By Lydia E. Ringwald
 

 

The Laguna Beach Art Museum ‘wows’ the world again with an innovative exhibit exploring the world of ‘gaming.’  'Surf Culture' a few years ago attracted international press and now ‘Wow’ wows us now inviting artists from all over the world to exhibit their ‘World of Warcraft’ weirdness.

High tech gamers enter a pixel paradise that engages them in epic life and death struggle with mythological dragons, snarling monsters, funky Medieval ‘warriors’ and weirdoes. 
A step beyond a conventional concept of painting and sculpture, the gaming world offers complete emersion into ‘art’ and ‘artifice’ forcing the viewer into either electronic participation or face annihilation. There is nothing more horrifying than one’s pixels disintegrating into cyberspace.

It’s scary, it’s fun and there is always the thrill of winning and moving on to a higher level of gaming challenge.  Just like life, eh?

Advances in technology have thrust is all into an electronically generated cyber-life. Emails, blogs, websites as powerful as Facebook and Twitter draw us into the mad nexus of pixel cyber-life.  Telephone communication has been transformed by IPhone and other wireless devices and communication escalates onto a new level as television and computer technology merge.

But ‘World of Warcraft’ offers cutting-edge tech that taps into the essential mythological quest for power, where good triumphs over evil and evil is redefined as good. A touch of Tolkien, a taste for evil, the pleasure of the perverse, drives World of Warcraft junkies craving for more. 

Any allusion to mythology, of course evokes the epic ‘Greats’ - the Iliad and the Odyssey, Beowulf, Les Chanson de Roland, Siegfried and the Nibelungen, Sir Lancelot and King Arthur and the Knights of the Round Table.  The Western World orientation of ‘World of Warcraft’ leans towards Medieval European style references, but with a little imagination, one can visualize how this could be expanded to include the Terracotta style warriors at X’ian, the Mesopotamian hero Gilgamesh, Alexander the Great, Shiva and a myriad of world heroes and foreign gods. Reveling in these realizations, we are ‘wowed’ again.

But those of us who are ‘Peace’ oriented, can’t help but question the fundamentals of the game. Why ‘Warcraft’? What about ‘Peacecraft’? – Yes, why don’t we change the game to reflect new values, new aspirations, in a game that challenges us to engage the powers of Peace in a dynamic struggle that places us all onto a new plane of consciousness?
What about a game where the ‘losers’ are the backward, cock-eyed warriors who end up tripping over themselves in self-defeating contradictory cyber-battles? Their pixels disintegrate  into oblivion as peaceful warriors prevail recycling Tai Chi energy onto new levels of consciousness, whirling us into a sustainable world in harmony with our environment.

The ‘winner’ plants trees, innovates miraculous devices to control or eliminate carbon emissions, harnesses the powers of the sun to produce clean energy.

As much as we are in awe of this bizarre cyber art form, we realize how we have the power to transform it – to direct the computer generated application towards new values, the values of the a Sustainable World – the destiny of the Future World   that guides our Spaceship towards a planet called Home, where the dynamics of peace prevail in the reality of everyday world politics, the flesh and blood of living in harmony  on here on Earth.

Perhaps the real power is to change the game, not play the game. New game - Peacecraft.

For more information, please contact the Laguna Art Museum – www.lagunaartmuseum.org

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