Modding originally refers to a practice in which players reach into the visual layer, ruleset or code of an existing video game in order to reshape it according to their own vision.
The gesture can carry far more than a cosmetic intervention, however. Rather than building new systems, modding lets us divert, stall and turn the existing one inside out, and in that displacement, everything that previously remained hidden behind the interface may become visible. The practice can also be considered outside the narrow context of video games, which is what the exhibition MODDING: Here’s All The Data! sets out to do, through analogue and digital gestures alike.
The exhibition aims to draw attention to the fact that political power lies in collective action within the existing world: in understanding the structures we are given not as ready-made products to be accepted, but as systems that can be shaped.
The developers of DOOM, released in 1993, introduced a file format that made the game relatively easy for individuals to modify. Levels, textures and sounds were stored in separate .WAD files, which could be modified or extended without reinstalling the whole game, and even without programming knowledge. The exhibition’s title alludes to these files, whose name derives from the question “Where’s All the Data?”
From then on, modding became a mass phenomenon: for more than three decades now, thousands of fans have been building their own levels, characters and entire scenarios for their favourite games. Components traditionally kept under strict control by publishers and developers were made not merely accessible through these purpose-built files, but encouraged individuals to intervene at the level of the system, at times even stimulating the creation of unofficial modifications. Today, publishers, having recognised the revenue potential (among other things) of modding, increasingly restrict the possibilities for intervention, and in many cases even buy up mods and put them behind a paywall.
Looking back at the small yet significant gestures of the nineties from our present, an age gasping from systemic crises, it seems timely again to leave a mark by intervening in what exists, organising from below rather than waiting for a total rewrite from above, and to reclaim and assert our agency at our own scale.
“The world doesn’t need new ideas. The challenge is simply to recognize what we already know to be true,” says Alexander R. Galloway. If we agree with him, modding is not only a possibility but a responsibility.
Exhibiting artists:
Bácsi Barnabás & Jules Cartier (FR), Bartus Csilla, Bódai András, Bokody Ákos, Hegyi Tamás, Rékai Márk, Rojas-Nagy Réka Miranda, Tihanyi Áron