THERE IS NO CENTRE

by Sarah Friend

When I first spawn into the lobby of the digital exhibition THERE IS NO CENTRE, curated by Katie Micak and hosted by the MacKenzie Art Gallery, I am in a grey-tiled room, bright and institutional. The exhibition’s title refers to the “magic circle” in video games, a special enclosed reality that players enter in order to play the game. The instructions are simple: “Rotate your view using your mouse or trackpad. Press the “L” key to return to the lobby.”

The exhibition title is lit in neon on the wall ahead, though I am, ironically, in the centre of a circle of monoliths. Each bears an image of one of the included artworks. The lobby space reminds me of Portal, or some other video game from an ambiguously evil corporation, and I spend some time inspecting the edges of the room. Although I know I am interacting with an art exhibition and likely do not need to solve a puzzle or defeat an enemy to move on, the instinct sticks. At the other side of the room, across from the exhibition title, is an elevator. I have been avoiding it because it seems too obvious but having found nothing else, I walk over. It contains a circular dial with glowing glyphs, one for each artwork. I pick at random and begin to explore.

The exhibition is structured as seven levels, though they are not numbered and have no hierarchy, and each work takes over its level without the constraints of euclidean space or shared aesthetics. Some of the works can be browsed directly, like Tom Sherman’s, which contains an excerpt from a historical video work at one end of a long white room, or Fallon Simard’s, which presents memes at massive scale, lining an overgrown industrial atrium. Thoreau Bakker’s digital sculpture is lightly interactive: a clickable loot-box that spits out cat sculptures with a cheerful pop. Other works are a game-within-a-game, like Milumbe Haimbe’s Eshu Elegbara – God of Crossroads, where the elevator deposits the player in an empty school bus to play out a 2D puzzle game, or When Rivers Were Trails by Elizabeth LaPensée and Weshoyot Alvitre (et. al), where the installation is a sunny grassland that links to the broader URL world, github.io in fact, where the full work can be downloaded. Adrienne Matheuszik’s Interstellar Illusions departs the most from the format of a “room.” It contains a labyrinthine spaceship interior with several floors that open onto an alien planet’s surface. As the player wanders in this frozen, depopulated world—the aftermath of a failed extraterrestrial luxury resort—they must construct their own answers about who came here and what went wrong.

Xuan Ye’s Belly of the Whale is set on a commercial cruise ship rendered with a high contrast black and white shader. In the exhibition text, it says that the paths of previous visitors will be visible as ghostly trails, but on my visit, I can’t see them. This is, I suspect, because of the precariousness of the digital exhibition context. The show closed on May 24, 2023, but I am encountering it in late July 2024. What does it mean for a digital exhibition to “close”? Copies of the .jpgs, .mp4s, and .js files that make up the digital exhibition are not scarce. There is no need to ship the works back to the artist’s studio because, in a sense, they never left. But the art world has norms, contracts, and budgets. And in Canada specifically, under CARFAC-RAAV recommendations, the runtime of an exhibition is one of the factors that influences the amount of the artist’s fee. If the exhibition were never to close, under this model, the fee owed by the exhibition space to the artist would become enormous as days accrue (though perhaps also never be paid, since invoices are also usually processed only after close). I suspect some invisible infrastructure that would allow the ghosts of other visitors to be displayed is no longer running because the exhibition is, technically, closed. The work leaves me with questions, and I wonder if having it in full fidelity would elucidate them. I press “L” to return to the lobby.

The digital exhibition is always adjacent to the glitch, not only because software created for and by artists is routinely underfunded, with tiny technical teams making up for the lack of organizational literacy with hard work and gumption, but indeed in the breakdown of art’s “magic circle” engendered by the digital context. When I enter a physical gallery, the door shuts behind me. The gallery walls are a literal boundary, within which objects are subject to a specific quality of attention and mode of reading. Within the gallery, the gesture of misidentifying the art object—for example, Danny Devito on It’s Always Sunny in Philadelphia soliloquizing about the beauty of the gallery’s air conditioner—is clearly identifiable as satire. The gallery space provides the attendee with a robust art-detection toolkit, including institutional critique. The digital exhibition is encountered differently.

When I first spawn into the lobby of THERE IS NO CENTRE, I am lying on my couch. My laptop is perched on my knees and I have 20 other tabs open, along with two file explorer windows, a terminal, and telegram chat. There is a takeout container on the coffee table beside me and a stack of books in various states of digestion. Ostensibly, none of these things are artworks. Yes, they speak to my context—digital freelancing, urban alienation—but this tableau is the product of expediency not artist intention. I could perform a satirical misrecognition here in my own apartment, but what’s the point for an audience of one? Without the gallery walls, it’s just another neoliberal intrusion of work into the personal. I am lying on the couch, clicking back and forth between Protonmail and the digital exhibition, both on the same 12.5-inch screen. Many of the interactions and visuals in the digital exhibition could be encountered only as glitches if they turned up in any of my other open tabs. The slippage between polished product and querulous artwork is generative.

One of my favourite moments is in Adrienne Matheuszik’s Interstellar Illusions, when, after turning a corner in the lower decks, I see a door marked “Access Corridor.” I enter, and promptly … fall out of the world. In the distance there’s a horizon that I immediately recognize as the default sky of Unity, the game engine that enabled the creation of THERE IS NO CENTRE. Above me, the geometric exterior of the digital exhibition shrinks smaller and smaller as my viewport sinks ever downwards. I am falling into nothingness. I have passed outside of game physics and I see the bare engine itself. The vista is cloudless as I fall.

Genuinely, I have no idea if this is an intentional interaction, but the curatorial statement for it is ready on my tongue. The mazelike levels of the artwork’s abandoned interstellar resort are haunted by the absent maintenance worker. How better to remind the viewer that the digital exhibition also has unseen workers? Much like a physical gallery has technicians who patch the walls and maintenance staff who sweep the floors, the digital exhibition has programmers who write toolkits. Of course, in the Access Corridor (infrastructure used by maintenance staff) on the Lower Decks (as in lower status) lies the easter egg, where we trip out of the narrative and into the world of these digital exhibition maintainers. Or it’s just a glitch. I don’t know. I can only fall in silence. Eventually, I press “L” to return to the lobby.