Multi-User Dungeon (MUD)

3rd Floor

Etoy.corporation, Öyvind Fahlström, Genevieve Goffman, Jack Goldstein, Matthias Groebel, Peter Halley, Yngve Holen, Josh Kline, Isabelle Frances McGuire, Seth Price, Harris Rosenblum, Avery Singer, Suzanne Treister, Anicka Yi

In conversation with Dungeon, Petzel is pleased to present Multi-User Dungeon (MUD), a group exhibition organized by Simon Denny.

The exhibition takes its title from an historical genre of computer game, called Multi-User Dungeons (MUDs). Early online adventure games often based on genres like fantasy or science-fiction, technically speaking, MUDs were text-based software that accepted connections from many simultaneous users. Starting in the 1970s, MUDs were the predecessors of contemporary Massive Multiplayer Online Role Playing Games (MMORPGs or MMOs). The era of the MUD’s emergence and prominence can be seen as an in-between time, which bridged the emergence of the commercial internet, and earlier networked systems like Bulletin Board Systems (BBS) and academic internets.

Today, as social media giants compete with startups to expand and standardize digital worlds, we find ourselves in another moment of transition, with these worlds exponentially increasing in importance and usage. The history of the MUD remains central as newer virtual worlds are designed and deployed. Hardware and software transformations–through types of screens, glasses, network structures and beyond, from online marketplaces to metaverses–affect the visual and the visceral.

MUD brings together artworks from many eras that can be seen to navigate the uncanny skeuomorphism of virtual worlds as they evolve over time and spill over into politics, finance and culture. They process and reflect worlds in between the analogue and the digital using “traditional” media like painting and sculpture as they meet new making tools that stem from screens, digital print and 3D print technology.