Exhibition Preview: Console Spirituality
A Cultural Engine for Our Time
One in three people on Earth plays video games. That’s over 3 billion players—across every continent, across generations—logging on, leveling up, building alternate selves, and exploring simulated realities. From interiority to multiplayer connection, this infrastructure is rewiring how we construct identity, form relationships, and reimagine the systems through which we represent ourselves and perceive others.
It’s Not Escapism, it’s Ritual
Opening June 24th on Feral File, Console Spirituality is curated by LAN Party (Vienna Kim & Benoit Palop), a Paris- and Tokyo-based duo whose practice centers on digital art, internet culture, and video games. Their curatorial approach draws from gaming subcultures, technostalgia, and worldbuilding—exploring how the narrative structures and symbolic systems of games shape digital visual culture and challenge the conventions of contemporary art.
The exhibition brings together five artists working at the intersection of game logic, glitch aesthetics, and digital mythmaking. Works by Emi Kusano, Keiken & Gabriel Massan, John Provencher, and Sabato Visconti channel the emotional power and ritual intensity of video games—and they’re so much more than images. Each is a portal into worlds shaped by identity, memory, technostalgia, and speculative faith. Born from the same conditions that have made gaming a dominant cultural form of the 21st century, these artworks glitch existing systems, render new ones, and ask what it means to make art in an age when our gods are avatars and our temples are rendered in Unity.
Game Logic, Cultural Language
Long embraced by experimental creators, art games and game-informed practices remain undervalued within contemporary art. But as a generation raised on game logic begins to shape the art world—both as artists and collectors—the visual language and systems thinking of games are becoming central to how culture is made, experienced, and understood. Console Spirituality foregrounds this evolution, positioning gaming’s thematic and aesthetic frameworks not as peripheral gestures, but as a foundational layer in the evolving landscape of contemporary art.
Preview, Collect, Join the Conversation
In the lead-up to the exhibition’s June 24th opening, we’ll preview each artwork as a distinct level—part of a four-part quest toward Console Spirituality. This format mirrors the curators’ framing of the show and offers an opportunity to highlight each work through focused writing on Substack. Tomorrow: Level 1, Dungeoneer by John Provencher and Level 2, Data Pilgrims by Emi Kusano. Unlike past Feral File exhibitions, it will be possible to collect the artworks when the exhibition opens on June 24th (17:00 UTC).
We hope you’ll join us for an exhibition walkthrough with the curators and artists at the exhibition opening, led by Michael Connor of Rhizome—our programming partner for this exhibition. Set a reminder to view, collect, and join the conversation when the exhibition opens June 24th 17:00 UTC (1:00 pm EDT) on Feral File.
If you have any questions about the works or how to collect, please email lauren@feralfile.com.
Can't wait for everyone to see the artworks in this show!!