Theresa Duncan and Eddo Stern @ DCA

Though billed together, CD-ROMS and Small Wars are starkly different affairs. The former, a retrospective of American artist Theresa Duncan, is light-hearted, modestly displayed and features work intended for children. The latter, by Israel-born and California-based Eddo Stern, is bombastic, cynical and includes a content warning. 

What unites them is their mode of expression; these are exhibitions either of, or presented via videogames. And while they set an exciting precedent for exhibiting videogames as contemporary art, both suffer teething problems.

Duncan’s CD-ROMS fares better. A sparse, bright room houses her games Chop Suey, Smarty and Zero Zero, along with some stills and accompanying packaging. Duncan’s colourful storybook worlds exude charm and imagination, imbuing the mundane with a winning playfulness: socks spill ooze-like out of drawers; flowers spring to life and take flight. The mere glance of her works offered here however (assuming you aren’t prepared to hog the games for hours on end) accentuates its less flattering qualities, like its scrappy presentation and dated instances of cultural appropriation, which we suspect grate less when experienced as a whole.

Though astounding in scale, Stern’s Small Wars proves similarly difficult to digest. Its centrepiece, Vietnam Romance, spreads across two screens, one wall-sized and the other mounted inside a giant plywood monitor. An alluring pastiche of war films, Romance’s hand-drawn, watercolour style seems fitting for what’s ostensibly a satire of ’Nam’s cartoonish portrayal in popular culture. But after multiple visits, we couldn’t say for sure. Its presentation is undoubtedly unique – like a live Let’s Play – but doesn’t lend itself to deep engagement, especially when you’re watching the bizarrely complicated tutorial being played for the sixth time. Perhaps that’s Stern’s point; that the historical substance of the Vietnam war gets lost in the formulaic trappings of entertainment media. We’d be guessing though. [Andrew Gordon]