NEORT++ is pleased to announce the upcoming game-themed group exhibition, "Any% Multideveloper — Reality in Polyphony."

Statement

"We might mistake this tranced moving for joy but there is no joy in it" - Margaret Atwood "The Circle Game" (1964)

Long ago, they say, four seasons cycled through this island, and people delighted in bathing in the summer sun. They could still let their thoughts wander — to lands not yet seen, to the stars beyond the sky.

The year 2026, the reference point of this exhibition, was the future once depicted a century ahead by the science-fiction film Metropolis (1926) — and it was also the virtuality forty years after Habitat (1986), the PC game often called the world's first metaverse. Is this the future you dreamed of? Is this the virtual world we once dreamed?

In a society overflowing with cross reality (XR), alternate reality games (ARG), and immersive experiences, we have constructed a world in which the "magic circle" — the conceptual boundary of games between the everyday and the extraordinary, as described by Katie Salen and Eric Zimmerman in Rules of Play (2003) — has become difficult to perceive. And yet, beyond the mere difficulty of perceiving that circle, the truth may be that we are already virtual players inside an enormous magic circle. The outside of this ever-expanding magic circle, like the event horizon of the cosmos, exists — but remains invisible.

On this island in particular, we have become players absorbed in the countless games inside the enormous magic circle. Have we not, then, come to treat the realities of those who suffer in different circles — climate change and environmental burden, conflict, unyielding prejudice, unreasonable inequality — as unplayable, watching them as if we were spectators of someone else's gameplay stream? We are dimly aware that this world is not an open world. It is, rather, a field composed of countless instanced dungeons that cannot connect to one another. In a society more complex and difficult than any previous era could have imagined, the implementation of a new meta capable of game-changing our environment is urgently sought.

This exhibition explores the out-game resonating in polyphony beyond such a gamified world.
"Any%" is a speedrunning term: to aim for the fastest possible game clear by exploiting every available means — bugs, glitches, and tricks — regardless of completion or collection rates. To break the circle and raise the flag of the true ending, the adventurers keep on developing the Any% extended future of this reality.

Curation

Yoshihide Manai (EXCALIBUR) + Yusuke Shono (NEORT++)