The Production of Space

The Production of Space is an ongoing series of sculptures by Irish visual artist Alan Butler. It takes its name from Henri Lefebvre’s seminal text, which argued that space does not merely exist, rather it is produced through a set of complex social and economic relations. The exhibition brings together a number of works which pivot around the story of a specific 2D image-texture file called ‘cobble_stone, which appeared across a wide array of video game titles in the 1990s. The cobble_stone image-tile originated from an asset pack which was shipped with 3D design application Alias/3, a ubiquitous application across VFX, product design, simulation, and video game industries in the early 90s. 

A conspiratorial story emerged from this discovery via a community of online media archeologists/sleuths called Render96 and 64History, who participate in collaborative explorations of digital cultures and minutiae on GitHub. In their account of the history of this digital asset, the appearance of the cobble_stone texture reveals that the Alias/3 software was used by multiple video game developers of this era and beyond, and as such the architectural and aesthetic experience of video games was to some degree homogenised. The same asset produced walls and flooring in video game titles including Donkey Kong 64, Mario Kart 64, Mortal Kombat 3, Banjo-Kazooie, and Final Fantasy VII, among many others.

In Butler’s exhibition, the form of cobble_stone is resurrected both digitally and physically through a number of modes which span iconographic, architectural intervention, sculptural and live multimedia software. Here the cobble_stone icon is utilised to apply the logic of game design to the physical architecture of the gallery space, and its form is applied to real-world architectural substances as a means to produce spatial and material experiences.


The Production of Space is supported by Culture Ireland | Cultúr Éireann.