Alan Butler
The Production of Space

Curated by
Nora O’ Murchú

Exhibition
2 April–9 May 2025
Aksioma | Project Space, Ljubljana

Opening
WED, 2 April at 8 PM

Part of Tactics&Practice #16: Are You A Software Update?
Curated by Nora O’ Murchú, Socrates Stamatatos, Janez Fakin Janša, Neja Berger

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 AUTHOR

Alan Butler (Dublin, 1981) works with traditional and new media as a means to explore subjects and ideas related to digital culture and their role in the formation of realities. With a production modality that utilises materials and media from the history of image-making, his body of work often examines how 3D graphics, video games and cloud technologies function both ideologically and politically. As part of the collective ANNEX he represented Ireland at the Venice Architecture Biennale 2021. Recently his work has been exhibited at V&A (2024), transmediale/Akademie der Künste (2023), The Photographers’ Gallery (2022) and Fotomuseum Winterthur (2021), among many others.

[+] RELATED ACTIVITIES

ARTIST TALK

Alan Butler
Material Outcomes in the Digital Subject
Wed, 2 April 2025 at 3 PM
The Academy of Fine Arts and Design, UL, Erjavčeva 23, Ljubljana

WORKSHOP

2girls1comp
I AM IN YOUR GAME – Reappropriating Game Spaces Through Texture Replacement
Wed, 2 April 2025 at 4.30 PM
The Academy of Fine Arts and Design, UL, Video, Animation and New Media, Tobačna 5, Ljubljana