Under its first dedicated virtual initiative ‘Open Systems’, Singapore Art Museum presents the online exhibition titled Open Systems 1_Open Worlds (OS1) that offers an immersive art experience exploring the digital worlds of video games.

Curated by Duncan Bass, it features 18 artworks by artists and thinkers from 14 different countries who reimagine digital realms and the limitations of virtual environments through film, music videos, video essays and interactive computer games that expose how the patterns of economic and social inequities of lived experience may also be observed in virtual spaces.

Gradually unfolding with six themed chapters that are refreshed with three new artist projects every two weeks, the exhibition adopts an introspective riff off ‘Open World’ gaming, reflexive of the supposed autonomy these free-roaming environments provide to users. Exploring themes of privatisation, artificial scarcity and inequalities that transfer between lived and digital realms, the exhibition presents the question considering how games and virtual spaces may function as sites to rehearse alternative and novel modes of social, political, and spatial organisation.