Peter Burr - Kinomural

Peter Burr is an artist from Brooklyn, NY who transforms complex computational systems into emotional, sensory experiences through large-scale immersive environments. Drawing from early experiments with computational graphics in the mid-nineties, Burr's practice has evolved to incorporate techniques that merge fundamental computing operations with modern real-time rendering systems. His work frequently explores the relationship between human-machine interfaces and the underlying systems that drive them. Previously Burr worked under the alias Hooliganship and founded the video label Cartune Xprez through which he produced hundreds of live multimedia exhibitions and touring programs showcasing a multi-generational group of artists at the forefront of experimental animation. His practice has been recognized through grants and awards including a Guggenheim Fellowship, a Creative Capital Grant, and a Sundance New Frontier Fellowship. His work has been presented at major cultural institutions including the Museum of Modern Art, The Barbican Centre, Documenta 14, the Whitney Museum of American Art, and the Centre Pompidou. Throughout his career, Burr has maintained an active presence in the computational arts field, with exhibitions in over 25 countries. He regularly presents his research at institutions including past keynotes at Yale University and Ars Electronica. He is a current PhD candidate in video games at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute.

CURATORIAL TEXT | RECREATIONAL DEATH

Death has always been the ultimate boundary, the final frontier beyond which no traveler returns. Yet in our digital age, we find ourselves experimenting with simulated deaths, virtual afterlives, and technological resurrections. We create doubles, avatars, and digital twins that outlive us. We die a thousand times in a game only to respawn with less loot.

What does it mean to play with death? To treat mortality not as the end but as a malleable space for experimentation? To turn the most profound boundary into a recreational playground?

This program explores how contemporary artists navigate this uncanny territory, creating works that blur the borders between existence and non-existence. Each piece is a temporary death chamber, a controlled environment where we can safely experience the dissolution of boundaries between self and other, human and machine, being and nothingness. In these simulated deaths, we don’t seek an end but a transformation. Here, we may briefly step outside ourselves and live in the world of apparitions.

Recreational death is the ultimate technological privilege: the ability to die without consequences, to play with our own extinction, to turn the definitive into something provisional. Or perhaps it’s just another way to domesticate the feral, to render familiar what will always remain fundamentally alien. Either way, as we collectively hallucinate these simulated demises we find ourselves in a new relationship with mortality. In this zone, death is not just inevitable but infinitely replayable.