Laguna Art Museum is hosting an exhibit entitled WoW: Emergent Media Production, a show that looks at how “cultural production” has been influenced by World of Warcraft and game culture, and features work by Blizzard staff, game developers and artists alike.
Running from now to October 4, the show “explores various forms of cultural production based on World of Warcraft in particular and on gaming in general” by looking at how “artistic practices” have been influenced by WoW and game culture.
Blizzard themselves provide a starting point for the exhibit with pieces by major players like Chris Metzen and Samwise Didier, but fourteen artists from around the world also provide work, including Michael Samyn of The Path developers Tale of Tales. Fan art and machinima are also included and examined in the exhibit.
Themes explored by the work on display in the show include “elements of desire, the collapse of fantasy, medievalism, creative critiques, and public intervention.” The bigger purpose of the exhibit, it seems, is to use WoW as a context for thinking about the “implications of gaming” and “their greater impact on our culture.” So yeah, this isn’t just an exhibit for looking at cool paintings of Arthas (though there probably are some).
WoW: Emergent Media Production will be accompanied by a weekly lecture series that’ll take place every Sunday at Laguna Art Museum from now until October 1. Topics that will be discussed will include a consideration of painter Hieronymous Bosch as compared to thematic imagery in WoW, some sort of “collaborative performance,” how WoW can act as a way of “constructing a fictional narrative,” and more.
If you’re in the neighborhood and feel like using your brainpower to do more than calculate how that new dagger’s going to change your DPS, check out the show.
