Purge, Pray, Play
In the fifth edition of the digital art biennale "The Wrong," artist Roni Karfiol and curator Lital Bar Noy presented the online exhibition "Purge Pray Play," an innovative response to Dante Alighieri's Divine Comedy. They argue that the interactive and participatory nature of digital art offers a potent solution to the pervasive issue of audience inattention in the contemporary art world.
Their project reimagines the Purgatory section of Dante's epic as an immersive, game-like experience. Instead of passively viewing artworks, the user becomes an active participant, navigating through a digital pavilion that functions like a "Quest game." Each level of the exhibition corresponds to a different terrace of Mount Purgatory, where souls cleanse themselves of sins such as pride, envy, and wrath.
Karfiol and Bar Noy's central claim is that by designing an engaging and interactive journey, they can capture and hold the viewer's focus in a way that traditional, static art forms often struggle to. The artists contend that in an age of digital saturation and short attention spans, art must evolve. Their solution is to create an experience that doesn't just invite contemplation but demands active engagement.
As Karfiol states in her artist statement, her work aims to reach the viewer "not as a passive viewer, but rather, as an active participator." The digital medium, for them, is not merely a new canvas but a tool to restructure the relationship between the artwork and its audience. By transforming the act of viewing into a playful, goal-oriented "quest," they propose a method to solve the "attention crisis" by making the audience an indispensable part of the art's unfolding narrative. Their work suggests that the future of engaging with art lies in creating dynamic, virtual experiences that resonate with the interactive habits of the 21st-century viewer.