Courtesy the artist
Rectangle is pleased to present
Entertainment at all costs
a group exhibition with
Cory Arcangel
JODI
Dirk Paesmans
UBERMORGEN
Opening Friday 5 September 2025, 5–8pm
5 September – 27 September 2025
Open Thursday, Friday and Saturday, 2–6pm
at Wouters Gallery
Bd d’Anvers 49, 1000 Brussels
In an age of infinite scrolls, algorithmic seduction, and gamified desire, entertainment no longer distracts — it governs. Entertainment at all costs brings together works that interrogate the aesthetics, logics, and consequences of a society doped with simulation, stimulation, and validation.
At the heart of the attention economy lies a grammar of engagement borrowed from video games and the narrative tropes of reality TV. Enhanced and weaponized, these psychologically tuned mechanisms have become ubiquitous. In this winner-take-all system, public life is staged in a vast role-playing game where players have learned how to win followers and wield influence; attention is farmed, and parasocial relationships become the inevitable standard.
Drawing on the spirit of Thorstein Veblen’s The Theory of the Leisure Class — and questioning its relevance in an era of mass, participatory leisure — the exhibition explores how play becomes labor, how fun becomes a form of social conditioning, and how the show must go on, no matter the cost. It offers a critical look at the soft power of entertainment and the ways it scripts our identities in spaces where intimacy becomes spectacle.
“The simulacrum is never that which conceals the truth—it is the truth which conceals that there is none. The simulacrum is true.”
— Jean Baudrillard, Simulacra and Simulation (1981)
software based on Wolfenstein game
Courtesy the artist
Courtesy the artist
UBERMORGEN, ’Trauma Dumping’ (Slogan 83), 2020
Courtesy the artist
Courtesy the artist
dual video, sounds, 03:01:10
Courtesy the artist
60 x 45 cm, Print on dibond, Edition of 5 + 1AP
Courtesy the artist
60 x 45 cm, Print on dibond, Edition of 5 + 1AP
Courtesy the artist
Courtesy the artist
Courtesy the artist
Biography
Cory Arcangel (born 1978, Buffalo, NY) is an artist and composer living and working in Stavanger, Norway.
Arcangel explores the potential and failures of old and new technologies, highlighting their obsolescence, humor, aesthetic attributes and, at times, eerie influence in contemporary life. Applying a semi-archeological methodology, his practice explores, encodes, and hacks the structural language of video games, software, social media and machine learning, treating them as subject matter and medium.
Recent projects include ‘Let’s Play Majerus G3’ at Michel Majerus Estate, Berlin; ‘ALL I EAT IN A DAY’ Curated by Cory Arcangel and Giovanni Carmine at Kunst Halle Sankt Gallen, Switzerland; 🌊,💨&🔥 at ’ART on THE MART, Chicago; “Worldbuilding: Gaming and Art in the Digital Age” at Julia Stoschek Collection, Dusseldorf, Germany and Centre Pompidou Metz, France. His work has been exhibited in solo exhibitions at Art on The Mart, Chicago; Kunstverein in Hamburg, Hamburg; Whitney Museum, New York; Carnegie Museum of Art, Pittsburgh;Barbican Art Center, London; Reykjavik Art Museum, Iceland; Hamburger Bahnhof, Berlin; Museum of Contemporary Art, Miami and the Migros Museum für Gegenwartskunst in Zürich.
UBERMORGEN
The day after tomorrow,’ CH/AT/US, est. *1995
UBERMORGEN is a bold and uncompromising team known for their feral energy and a relentless rise on the global art stage. Admired for their vulgar Haute Couture Pixel Aesthetics, Dark AI, Media Hacking, and Polarizing Research, Artfacts defines the net.art pioneers’ work as ‘contaminated peak hyper contemporary.’ CNN called them ‘Maverick Austrian Business People’ for their Vote-Auction project, which reached half a billion people and drew the ire of the FBI, CIA, & NSA. Mid 2000s, their ‘EKMRZ Trilogy’ disrupted the 3 biggest e-commerce giants, in 2017, they released the first ever AI project at the Liverpool Biennale, while blending AI with CCTV horror in their ‘UNINVITED’ project. During the crypto hype, ‘The D1cks’ conquered traditional auction houses, and recent retro AI projects ‘PMC Wagner Arts’ (KW Berlin), and ‘The Silver Singularity’ (Busan Biennale) pushed elitism in art to the absolute maximum.
Selected Exhibitions:
Whitney Museum, MoMA PS1, Centre Pompidou, Gwangju Biennale, Louvre Paris, Biennale of Sydney, Liverpool Biennial, KW Institute for Contemporary Art, SFMOMA, MOCA Taipei, ICA Miami, The National Museum of China, Serpentine Galleries, Kunsthal Aarhus, V&A London, Chronus Shanghai, Museo Reina Sofia, New Museum, Somerset House, Haifa Museum of Art, The Hermitage Museum, HKW Berlin, ZKM, HMKV, National Art Gallery Sofia, Ars Electronica, ArtScience Singapore, 3331 & ICC Tokyo, WRO Media Art Biennale, Prague Biennale, Busan Biennale, The Bogotá Museum of Modern Art.
JODI, or (jodi.org) – pioneered net.art in 1995. JODI were among the first artists to investigate and subvert conventions of the Internet, computer programs, and video and computer games. Radically disrupting the very language of these systems, including visual aesthetics, interface elements, commands, errors and code. JODI stages extreme digital interventions that destabilise the relationship between computer technology and its users by subverting our expectations about the functionalities and conventions of the systems that we depend upon every day.
JODI’s work is featured in most art historical volumes about digital and media art, is exhibited worldwide in ; Documenta-X; Stedelijk Museum, Amsterdam; ZKM; ICC; CCA; Guggenheim; IMAL; Centre Pompidou; Eyebeam; FACT; MoMi; Harvard Art Museums; Rhizome; MoMa, among others.
http://jodi.org
Dirk Paesmans
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