Play to Post: the Archive Gamified
June 2017
Commissioned by and exhibited at W139
In collaboration with Gabriëlle Gijsbers
Play to Post was commissioned by W139, an artist-run gallery in Amsterdam. Their request was to revive their archive, which documents the history of the gallery from 1980 up until today.
In response Gabriëlle Gijsbers and me made an interactive installation that was put on display at the entrance of W139 during the Pentecost weekend. In the installation, visitors could play a game of Tetris with images from the archive as blocks. Every time a visitor would play a square of three by three blocks, this composition would disappear from the game. It would then be uploaded automatically to the Instagram account of W139.
As a result, the Instagram feed became a stream of weirdly cut-out fragments of the archive, often rotated and/or pixelated, posted in high speed. The installation posted around three hundred images in just four days, generated by over a hundred visitors, making the Instagram account lose almost two hundred and fifty followers.