HIS MINECRAFT

HIS MINECRAFT is an analogue study of virtual spaces. Using 4x5 color negative, Irving has developed a bespoke method of photographing digitally-generated interiors found within her husband’s private Minecraft city.

In her series HIS MINECRAFT, Irving uses large format analog photography to explore the interiors of a private virtual world. Since its release in 2011, Minecraft is the best-selling video game of all time with over 238 million copies sold and nearly 140 million monthly active players worldwide. One of those players is the artist’s husband. He has been building a city since 2012, and unlike many users of this game, he does not play publicly or collaboratively. He describes the methodical building process as extremely therapeutic; brick by virtual brick, he has created a vast and intricate city that has effectively become both a refuge and a time capsule of the past decade of his life. 

Having never played video games herself, Irving became curious and quickly discovered that a great many of his building’s interiors are quite similar to the spaces that she photographs in the physical world. After getting permission to wander around a copy of his city, Irving has created a bespoke method of photographing these digitally-generated interiors with an analog medium. Using a laptop hooked up to a Samsung 55 inch QLED 4K flat screen television via a 4K HDMI cable, she pauses Minecraft’s first person POV on her desired composition and makes a long exposure on 4x5 color negative of the static virtual interior. She then makes a high resolution drum scan which captures the image with analog light, converting it to a digital file.  This process produces the most detail possible in each color channel, so much detail in fact, that the individual LED lights of the television are visible on her final prints. From binary code to computer, from computer to television, from television to emulsion, from emulsion to scan, from scan to lightjet print the size of a television - this unique methodology allows Irving to craft our view of these spaces by moving her gaze between multiple medias of representation and our representational media. 

These images have many layers. While the motif of how our simulated worlds have become entwined with our analog lives rings true for the vast majority of us, HIS MINECRAFT is also a deeply intimate project. Beyond the fact that very few people have ever viewed this virtual world, the artist's attraction to these spaces is just as much about their formal elements as the visceral reactions she has to her husband’s creative choices. From this angle, her gaze becomes a veneration of his vision and dedication to this creation, manifesting as visual love letters to the man she adores. He has created a finite world and Irving shows us the sightlines that make it infinite.