Hans Ulrich Obrist on How Video Games Can Level-Up the Art World

What if the next time you went to a museum you didn’t just look at the art on the wall—what if you activated a controller and played it? 

To a certain degree, this is already happening. Video game-based art has been displayed in major shows, from the Venice to the Whitney biennial; MoMA has historical video games from Pong to Minecraft in its permanent collection; and the pioneering video game artist Auriea Harvey recently had a survey at the Museum of the Moving Image that had almost as many controllers as wall labels.

But Hans Ulrich Obrist, the eminent curator and artistic director of London's Serpentine Galleries, has a vision for the future of art where video games play a far more prominent role—and where, in fact, they are primed to have a transformative impact on the broader art ecosystem.

Hans Ulrich declared 2025 to be the “Year of Video Games” at the Serpentine, how his institution has been pioneering the fusion of art and technology for over a decade, and what the future of the museum experience might look like.