Artists dealing with technology and the feeling of new technological environments belong to a thread of Modernism that underlies the entire 20th century. Dada, Surrealism, Italian Futurism...all involve dealing with machines and their adjacency to the history of violence.

TESS POLLOK: You’ve been making work for decades now about the intersections between the online world, technology, violence, and contemporary art. You’re also involved with two shows up right now at Petzel Gallery: Dungeon, which is a solo show of your own work, and Multi-User Dungeon (MUD), which is a group show you curated around similar themes of gamification and the internet experience, specifically the dungeon crawling format of early online MMORPG games and pre-internet games like Dungeons & Dragons. Both of these shows are up through March 30–so go run and see them right now!! You’ve explored gaming and the online world a lot in your work already, what made you want to think about dungeons?

SIMON DENNY: I’m always doing some kind of research into the endless cultural behemoth that is gaming, and with Dungeon and Multi-User Dungeon I was thinking about the dungeon as a cultural idiom that’s been critical to describing an influential imagination which has informed the design of the internet. As someone who works in the art world, I believe in the power of contemporary art to act as a vehicle for distilling cultural material, but I don’t always see the idiom of dungeons or online culture being taken so seriously in those spaces. So when I made Dungeon, I was thinking about how the dungeon deserved more attention as a cultural vector. I curated Multi-User Dungeon alongside it because I’m a fan of other artists’ work on this subject as much as I am a maker of work on this subject. In curating Multi-User Dungeon, I tried to present artists who used “traditional” mediums like printing and sculpture to deal with the materiality of the internet; I also tried to bring together works that tie our present moment with the online world to the history of the internet. The name M.U.D. draws on the pre-World Wide Web history of the dungeon as a gaming/chatroom archetype and acts as a bridge between that time period and the contemporary MMORPGs.

POLLOK: It’s interesting that you would mention the pre-internet history of the dungeon because the aesthetics of Dungeon really remind me of Dwarf Fortress, which was one of the first games to combine dungeon crawling with city-building and it’s online but uses entirely text-based characters. I think it came out in 2002. Or, a more relevant contemporary example would be the success of Baldur’s Gate 3.

DENNY: Right! I drew on a couple of specific reference points from gaming for Dungeon, one was this early pre-Warhammer board game called HeroQuest, which was a late 80s board game, and, actually, another was a Hannah Montana-themed edition of a board game called Mall Madness. And some very contemporary experimental crypto games – like Dark Forest and World Wide Webb. I think all these kind-of scripted spaces have similar reward structures in mind, like, the mall game has a kinship to the dungeon game and both are kind of present in online worlds. In our contemporary metaverse, or, you know, whatever the next hype cycle will call it, both malls and dungeons exist as these labyrinthine spaces–that was what I was thinking about making these sculptures.

POLLOK: Are you a gamer yourself?

DENNY: I’m not a hardcore gamer, I’m more of a flâneur of gaming worlds, or maybe even a cultural student of gamers, than anything else. I definitely have my touchpoints. I was very into Wolfenstein. [Laughs] Perhaps that’s showing my age.

POLLOK: How do you curate shows? In general and with specific reference to Multi-User Dungeon, I’m wondering who inspires you and how you locate artists you admire.

DENNY: I partly work with people that I have got to know as colleagues, artist friends, Josh Kline, whose work opens the show, is definitely in that category. I grew up in New Zealand but I started showing work more widely when I moved to Berlin and Josh and I kind of emerged in a lot of the same group shows and artist contexts at that time and we became friends. Every time I’m in New York, I make sure to spend a day with Josh unpacking what we’re working on, both in format and thinking. I try to curate things from an acknowledged subject position – situated curating, for want of a better term, maybe . My subjectivity is present. With regards to print technology and screens, I’m interested in some dialogue between screens and offline artistic formats. In Multi-User Dungeon, there’s no moving images at all–which is in contrast with art-games, which is a growing category in contemporary art in and of itself. MUD presents a lot of painting and painting-adjacent works that use different versions of print within a painterly discourse. And a kind of model-making as sculpture, as well. I like to draw on many eras and put works into unexpected dialogue with one another. For example, in Multi-User Dungeon, there’s works from the ‘60s, the ‘80s, 90s, 2000s, and newer artists that are working right now.I came across a group of young artists who were working with these ideas, specifically Genevieve Goffman, Isabelle Frances McGuire and Harris Rosenblum, who are showing in younger galleries. I like shows around exhibition spaces like Blade Study, King’s Leap, and Sara’s–younger spaces down near Henry Street were introducing this Gothic, dungeon-adjacent imagery but were making paintings and sculptures again, often using “digital” object and image making processes like 3D print and digital print. That was so awesome for me because that’s what I’m excited about, as well. I felt like nobody else was drawing a throughline between how these practices relate, older generations of contemporary art practice across time.

POLLOK: I love that. It’s so interesting to me how these aesthetics get recycled and reborn and re-interpreted. I was thinking the other day about Joseph Cornell and his lightboxes and how they look just like memes and things that Angelicism puts out, and he was born in 1903.

DENNY: Exactly! I also think artists dealing with technology and the feeling of new technological environments belong to this sub-thread of Modernism that underlies at least all of the 20th century. For example, Dada and Surrealism were in the back of my mind as I assembled this show and made these artworks . These currents involved dealing with machines and their adjacency to histories of depicting or imaging spaces which are adjacent to violence and the extension of that into the kinetic world. I think Dada came at a moment where violence was gripping Europe and it was a communicative response to that, an escape from it, maybe. Dada, initially, was sort of outside of the gallery space but used collage and art techniques both new and that had been around for a long time – in dialogue with contemporary media and news media. Then following on from that, Surrealism’s full embrace of the illustrative kind of breaks up some of the visual identity of early Modernism, towards Pop. I can see echoes of this in the art of my peers, and these younger artists too, maybe. We’re using language in a similar way, we’re embracing technological changes and contemporary media. But we’re also reacting to the world and its history, which are deeply intertwined with different types of violences.

POLLOK: Could you give any examples of where you see that happening? The violence adjacent to technology?

DENNY: I see a throughline where the visibility of defense tech is growing steadily, and there’s definitely a line from Dungeons & Dragons that connects the game to a lot of this industry’s visual and written language. In both shows I show defense technology as a major investment category. My work often draws inspiration from what technologists talk about. I pay a lot of attention to that community and find them really interesting and culturally relevant. Nowadays, people in the technology world feel comfortable embracing a patriotic and nationalistic position publically. I’ve noticed a shift in investors and technologists strategically making moves towards defense tech in a more public manner. The media coverage about this trend has also been growing. However, this is not new. Silicon Valley has been made possible thanks to defense technologies: the internet and the commercial computing industry are all R&D children of defense research budgets. While this history has been backgrounded in the last couple of decades, nowadays, companies like Palantir and Anduril are now just as mainstream as companies like Alphabet and Facebook. They feel like the same asset class and investment space. I think that has seeped out into mainstream media and how the technology industry frames itself, which I see as an interesting sign of the times.

POLLOK: Do you feel like the conversations people are having about war and technology are productive?

DENNY: [Laughs] I’m hesitant to make big claims about how X and Y is because my personal thinking and growth on these topics is dynamic, and my data here is anecdotal. One thing I will say is that the gap between political communities feels wider. It used to be easier to find a middle ground between different types of thinkers and now there’s a lot more conflict that happens a lot more quickly about how to respond to X, Y, Z things or situations. This is true for local issues like where arts funding comes from and who gets it and also for larger geopolitical issues like Gaza or Ukraine. It’s challenging for me because I like difference and I like people who see things differently. And I like to be in touch with people who see things differently than me, and that’s becoming more difficult, to be in conversation with people who might have different opinions.

POLLOK: I feel that so strongly. I think a lot about how our language has decayed and there’s less shared language between people. Like, the same words mean different things to different people, and it’s becoming increasingly difficult to communicate anything, which is a very isolating and alienating way to live. Do you feel like the internet is responsible for that?

DENNY: I mean, that seems to be a conventional story by now, right?– One narrative would be that social media has produced algorithmic environments that respond well to people disagreeing. Those same algorithmic environments also encourage people to find these highly specialized interest groups of affinity. Both of these things have become rewarded online and therefore have exacerbated a lot of the differences between communities. That’s an analysis I’ve heard from different sides, you know, that’s seemingly a bipartisan analysis of the situation. One of the investment groups I pay a lot of attention to is Andreessen Horowitz (a16z). I'm really interested in that VC firm and their many investment verticals. I named an exhibition I did at Dunkunsthalle (also closing today!) after a text they put out called Read, Write, Own, by the a16z Crypto Founder Chris Dixon, which states that the future of the internet must involve more open source and more blockchains because Web2’s giants have made it impossible to make anything new profitable. It rehearses a lot of arguments I saw critiquing the internet ten years ago from artists who didn’t like what was happening with social media. It seems everybody can agree that social media is annoying and has its problems. It’s an uncontroversial claim, but, yeah, the internet has promoted difference to a point where there’s no common ground.

POLLOK: Who or what is Andreessen Horowitz?

DENNY: Andreessen Horowitz is maybe one of the most visible investment firms in Silicon Valley. It was co-founded by Marc Andreessen and Ben Horowitz, who are ‘90s era technology OGs. Marc Andreessen founded Netscape, the first world wide web browser. They’ve invested in a lot of very successful companies over the years: AirBnB, GitHub, Facebook, Instagram, Lyft, Oculus, Roblox, Skype, Slack. But they also are deeply invested in crypto infrastructure and consumer products. They’re also, interestingly, one of the firms that produces the most public-facing media. They have a really amazing podcast, they send out a lot of newsletters, and they host a lot of conferences, meetups and other forms of discursive spaces. They also invest in and hire researchers and communications people that address the general public a lot more than other VC firms seem to.

POLLOK: So Andreessen Horowitz is invested in the digital infrastructure of everything, basically.

DENNY: Yeah. Not only that, but what I really like and find really interesting about them is that they’re intellectuals, as well, and they think about politics and talk about politics publicly. Marc Andreessen recently did a talk about how important optimism is for technologists and that was even formulated into a public manifesto. In interviews, he’s even drawn on some art history references like Futurism, Italian Futurism, you know, and how manifestos from other eras have been more optimistic about technology than now. It’s interesting in particular that he drew on Futurism because there’s some complicated politics around Italian Futurism, but, to be fair, there are many around artist movements in the first half of the last century. I just think it’s really interesting that they not only invest but produce discourse and act as intellectual leaders in their field. I see venture capitalists as deeply influential on our contemporary world because they gather and allocate capital towards the technologies that shape society. To a certain extent, they are a part of the societal apparatus that decides which things are going to be winners. So I think we as artists should pay attention to what they do and say because if they’re producing ideas, you know, those ideas are important because they have downstream capital and allocation ramifications – and by extension infrastructural and cultural.

POLLOK: I’m having a really interesting response to this that actually ties us back to gaming. I’m fascinated with how prescient video games are at predicting what’s going to happen, more so than books or visual art or any other cultural medium, in my opinion. Like, the first Assassin’s Creed game was released in 2007 and it revolves around a character who’s able to use genetics to access the memories of his ancestors–which was a completely fake idea at the time, but since then epigenetic research has shown that the lived experiences of our ancestors actually directly affect our own genetic expression. Or, like, the plot of Bioshock, which also came out in 2007, is about a libertarian billionaire who builds an underwater city to escape corporate control–and that’s what Peter Thiel is trying to do right now.

DENNY: Yes – actually Isabelle Frances McGuire’s work is partly based on Assassin’s Creed in the MUD show. And regarding that seasteading-ish narrative of Bioshock, I made a lot of artworks about Peter and his intellectual world from 2016 to 2018. I thought it was all very important stuff at the time. Seasteading is really interesting and there have been a lot of ramifications to those ideas. Going “outside” to start a new community has become somewhat of a meme in certain technology communities. I’m sure Praxis is on your radar. These communities are much more formalized than they used to be. There’s Próspera in Honduras, which is an independent, economically-specialized zone that has claims to its own sovereignty, even though it’s also kind of under the umbrella of Honduras. California Forever, is another project where a bunch of technology-adjacent investors have bought land northeast of San Francisco. There’s this idea to build worlds that closely resemble independent market city-states coming out of some technologist communities.

POLLOK: But that’s also not a new thing. In City of Quartz, Mike Davis writes about the commune that existed just east of LA for about forty years or so. To me, Praxis is the most egregiously silly of them all.

DENNY: It’s funny how things can seem silly through one lens and then not so silly just a little while later. A lot of people in my artistic community laughed at Worldcoin up until quite recently, however Worldcoin is driving crypto adoption like no other company has done. What is Praxis? Right now it’s primarily a community, but the value of community can be very high. There’s another adjacency here, not just to the dreaming of utopia and exiting society that you’re talking about, but also to a longer history of Silicon Valley. The ‘60s hippie dropout and commune-building practice is explicitly connected geographically and intellectually to the history of that world. Stuart Brand and The Whole Earth Catalog etc.-all mapped out in Fred Turner’s work.

POLLOK: How do you feel about contemporary art today? Is it responding appropriately to the moment? Do you believe in it?

DENNY: I’m a huge contemporary art lover. That’s my tribe, that’s where I see my home. I venture into other worlds, you know, the world of venture capitalists, technologists and the world of gaming, but I’ve been educated in and socialized into the world of contemporary art. I’m also institutionally invested in contemporary art. I'm a professor and I co-founded a mentoring program, BPA, here in Berlin that’s associated with KW Institute for Contemporary Art. I love contemporary art. I think it’s a cultural space that produces a lot of value in all sorts of different ways, cultural value as well as community value. I’m very convinced of that. Not bearish at all.

Simon Denny is a Berlin-based contemporary artist. His solo show Dungeon is on view now through March 30 at Petzel Gallery alongside a group show he curated, Multi-User Dungeon.

Tess Pollok is a writer and editor-in-chief of Animal Blood.