DMY – Berlin Design City

Wow, what a weekend. Since Wednesday last week, Berlin has turned into the Mecca of Design, bustling with the exhibitions, events, parties, and lectures within the monumental program of DMY Designfestival. Pretty much impossible to catch all of it – unless you feel like skipping sleep and food intake for a couple of days straight, which most of us aren’t.

In this post, you’ll peek into A MAZE, an exhibition of game-artists’ work in the extended program of DMY, and get a review of the ALLSTARS exhibition, where design professionals from all over the world got together.

1. A MAZE

Following Bastian’s suggestion to visit A MAZE, I went to check out this exhibition focusing on game-art. Video and computer games have been the subject matter of artistic interventions for some years now, with artists, designers and programmers re-thinking and re-evaluating their favorite games with a critical or often humorous approach.The small exhibition space was tucked away Berlin-style in what once must have been a regular appartment on Brunnenstraße. Two installations struck my mind: Leif Rumbke’s ‘Wargames’ and Martina Kellner’s ‘Pac-man Time-out’.

WARGAMES

Leif’s installation shows a battlefield on which two contesting armies (one dressed in blue, the other brown) are gunning each other down. The aesthetics are borrowed from 80ies wargames: cute, clumsy little figures that show little detail or realism. This is a contrast to the explicit action on the battlefield: bodies remain lying on the ground, the entire battlefield is soaked with blood. The battle keeps going on in a pointless routine. The game is programmed in such a way that each killed solider is replaced by a new one. For those who are watching, there’s only one way to interact with the game: by pushing a huge red button in front of the battlefield. With this action, we’re not resolving the battle in any way, but instead dropping a bomb onto the battlefield, wiping it clean of soldiers and stirring up the soil, so that it now looks less bloodstained. And then, the battle starts over.

It’s a profound comment on the conventions of representation in the genre of wargames, expressed in a simple system. Although interaction with this game is limited, the symbolic weight of the red button, the apocalyptic bomb and the endless battle is a temptation to keep ‘pushing the button’ over and over again…

PAC-MAN TIME-OUT

Martina Kellner’s installation is a take on one of the most famously played games of all times: Pac-Man. In the Pac-Man universum, there has always been speculation about what happens to Pac-Man when he disappears through the open left or right channels on the side of the maze (to reappear on the other side after just a few seconds).

But what happens in these precious seconds? Where is Pac-Man? Martina Kellner has found the answer and inserts Pac-Man adventure stories into the time-out sequences when Pac-Man disappears from the screen.

2. DMY ALLSTARS

We are now at the main DMY exhibition by professional designers all over the world, sprawling over several floors of the newly opened IMA design village on Ritterstraße. This location, a former factory building, offers studio appartments, workspaces and recreational spaces, striving to become a hub where “where artists and designers can network, collaborate, or work independently in a creatively charged atmosphere”.

After a week of exhibiting, talking, and partying, the atmosphere wasn’t exactly charged when I arrived at the location on Sunday. With so many similar spaces like that (for example the Josettihöfe), I wonder how IMA is going to perform in the future and which spot it is going to claim in the vast array of event/exhibition spaces in Berlin.

What it has to offer is a multi-storied former factory building, a yard and café. On several levels, connected rooms showed the exhibits of design studios and individual desigers. There was one room showing current works from Taiwan, and a sepcial exhibit by Seoul Design Festival.

Two works I saw deserve to be pointed out in my opinion because of their wit and ability to surprise. One is a plush carpet by Lise Elsayed, with integrated ‘parking spaces’ for plush slippers – playing on the similar functionality and texture of carpet and the slipper.

The second is an installation by Maxim Velcovsky, a work which is the result of a co-operation between traditional Austrian manufacturers and young designers, initiated by the Vienna Design Week.

Three light boxes show delicate shadows of what appear to be famous city-scapes: Moscow, New York, London…?

Upon closer investigation, the boxes reveal a true surprise. The shadows are all cast by nothing more than cleverly arranged crystal glass ware – yes, by the Austrian traditional glass manufacturer J.& L. Lobmeyr. A concept of cooperation that really seems to be a fruitful one. Amazing work!