Brody Condon

It is impossible to imagine life today without video games. What is the effect on people of switching back and forth between daily and virtual reality? What is reality in fact? For Brody Condon these are questions that connect together art and the computer. All his sculptures, performances and animated images play with the blurring of the boundary between reality and fiction, while their design is grafted onto that of computer games. One example is Suicide Solution, a compilation of 50 images from games in which the player is the first one to die. The repetition dampens the initial shock and deprives death of its realism.

For Sonsbeek 2008, Condon capitalizes on a growing social phenomenon influenced by video games: LARP, or Live Acting Role Playing. It involves groups of people playing a game for several days, in which the framework and roles are prescribed, but are freely interpretable by the players. The game could be a mediaeval battle or it could be life as a homeless person, with all the appropriate costumes and attributes. Groups of Larpers will be spending seven weekends in Sonsbeek Park playing a game devised by Condon and Bjarke Pedersen, which is full of rituals and is entitled The Twentyfivefold Manifestation. Their home basis is a twelve metre high tower. LARP is the material that Condon uses to show up our social world as a succession of stagings. His ‘living art’ project shows us a fabulous capacity to shift between various realities.

The Guild of Larpers carried a costumed Larper on a litter during the Procession.