Art This Week: Extinct Fish and Playable Simulations

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Seven Games / Sometimes to Deal With the Difficulty of Being Alive I Need to Believe There is a Possibility That Life Is Not Real
Opening Thursday, May 23 at Denny Dimin Gallery, 6 pm to 8 pm. On view through June 30.

The line between art and video games was blurred a long time ago, but the two shows opening at Denny Dimin Gallery this Thursday cast an even wider net, dealing with both digital gaming experiences and more analog, nostalgic board games. Jeremy Couillard’s very lengthily-named Sometimes to Deal With the Difficulty of Being Alive I Need to Believe There is a Possibility That Life Is Not Real is far from a standard exhibition; it’s an interactive simulation (playable both in the gallery and on PCs via Steam) that takes place in a future where humans have gone extinct and AI has started to rule. Meanwhile, Brent Birnbaum has collected over 200 board games and proceeded to disassemble and repurpose them into something new, but still familiar.