Rethinking Intermedia Practices during the Pandemic: Staging and Conception of Alexander Schubert’s Virtual Reality Video Game Genesis

Alexander Schubert’s most recent artistic research involves a renewed consideration of digital and human realities, merging them through interactive media and virtual environments. Genesis (2020) is a participative installation designed as a web-based video game. Home gamers control four avatars impersonated by real-life human performers living in an empty industrial hall in Hamburg over seven days. This chapter investigates its conception and staging that occurred during the emergence of the COVID-19 pandemic. Being held by online users and involving a restricted number of people within the performance hall, Genesis is one of the few events confirmed within the Elbphilharmonie 2019/2020 season. The preliminary stages’ field study and the author’s testimony outline a working schedule affected by staff restrictions and technical issues. Still, the performance sticks to the original concept regardless of the emerging constraints: Schubert’s approach encompasses the digital mediation of community instances, fitting perfectly with gamers’ and avatars’ isolation. To this extent, the analysis of internal dynamics related to extraordinary circumstances becomes the litmus test to show already emerging processes. Institutional, social, and aesthetic needs converge in the informatics’ mediation, and the performative virtual space enlightens the intermedia transition as a cultural artefact.