Special exhibitions
Longing is a desire that is often perceived as downright painful. We long, for example, for another being, for certain objects or places, or even for an idealized state. As an anthropological constant, longing has fascinated people from Plato to Hegel and continues to manifest itself prominently in artistic forms of expression and pop culture.
Digital games as works of art are also closely related to our personal, social, and political realities of life. In them, individual fates as well as social discourses or political agendas are taken up and processed. So it is not surprising that digital games also have many links to the theme of longing.
In this exhibition, we focus on precisely these connections between longing and digital games. The exhibition is designed to be interactive and invites its audience to trace different forms of longing with a great deal of curiosity.
Where do we encounter longing as an action-guiding element on a narrative level?
How does longing for the past influence game aesthetics or mechanics? Which longings do digital games awaken in us?
And which ones are they able to satisfy?
Idea, production, curation, scenography, graphics, editing:
[we love old games]: Mascha Tobe & Philipp Frei
Project management CSM: Nicole Hanisch, Kristin Bahre
Exhibition technology: Matthias Oborski Video production: Margarita Filipenko
In-game photography: Felix Zimmermann Technical support: Tobias Hermann, Martin Wagner
Project assistance: Federico Lenzi, Raphael Giraldi, Lucas Maaser
The special show was made possible by the project funding "Perspektive Kultur". We would like to thank the Senate Department for Culture and Europe Berlin for their support.
Start your engines
The large and small donations of our visitors have made it possible for us to purchase a Sega Rally Championship machine (1994) in the twin version for two players. We celebrate the two machines with the special exhibition START YOUR ENGINES on the development of racing game machines.
The interactive special exhibition features four original arcade milestones from the 1980s and 1990s: Pole Position (1982), Super Monaco GP (1989), Crazy Taxi (1999) and Sega Rally Championship (1994) in the two-player version.
We wish you a good ride!
Impact Games
The special exhibition "Impact Games" immerses visitors in a time when computer games conquered our everyday lives. The journey through time leads from video game machines set up in public to home consoles from various decades. In authentically restaged experience rooms, visitors can play themselves the beginnings of our digital information society on original devices.
Living room, late 1970s.
The first home video games were not sold as toys for children, but as adult or family entertainment. Households usually had only one television set in the living room. Therefore, these devices were adapted to the designs common at the time, for example, by using wood veneers.
Hobby room, 1st half of the 1980s.
After Apple (1977) successfully established the first home computer with the Apple II, more and more people began to deal privately with the new technology. Whereas computers had previously only been something for specialists, from now on many more people were able to acquire this new technology. Helped by a rapid drop in prices, home computers spread quickly through households, especially as gaming machines.
Children's room, 2nd half of the 1980s.
Mainly due to the success of the Japanese video game manufacturer Nintendo, the image of video games changed: An amusement for all generations increasingly became a children's toy. This development was supported by the purchase of second televisions for children's rooms and by the successful, mobile, battery-powered gaming devices. Thanks to their simplicity, these devices were so inexpensive that even children could buy them with their pocket money.
Living room, mid-1990s.
In the mid-1990s, we find the next milestone. With the CD-ROM, an optical data carrier reached production maturity that could store many times the amount of data than the standard data carriers of the time. For the first time, entire film sequences and complex soundtracks could be packed into a game. So it was only logical that the space in the living room came back into focus and video game consoles were marketed as multi-media devices.
