Designing the Infinite: Virtual Worldbuilding in Art & Gaming

December 6, 2025 - April 12, 2026

Worldbuilding has long served as a tool for understanding identity, community, and our place within the universe, from creation stories and cosmologies to medieval illuminated manuscripts, speculative fiction, and early experimental cinema. Designing the Infinite extends this lineage further into the digital age, bringing together artists from across the globe who use game engines, virtual environments, and interactive technologies to construct new worlds and interrogate existing systems.

Video games share many foundational principles with worldbuilding practices, including the construction of characters and avatars, the design of environments and rule systems, narrative structure, and the negotiation of choice, agency, and consequence. These elements shape how participants understand their role within a world and how meaning emerges through interaction over time. Many of the artists in Designing the Infinite draw on these shared frameworks, creating virtual spaces that examine how identities are formed, how stories are carried forward, and how communities adapt to shifting conditions.

Emerging from more than sixty years of moving image experimentation, video games have long occupied a marginal position within contemporary art and criticism, despite their widespread social impact. In today’s networked landscape, they function as sites of social exchange, socioemotional learning, and radical imagination. Designing the Infinite considers this ongoing shift, presenting games and game-based artworks as cultural artifacts shaped by their moment, responsive to lived experience, and open to multiple ways of being encountered and understood.

Featured artists: Afrah Shafiq, Basmah Felemban, Cassie McQuater, David Blandy & Larry Achiampong, JODI, LaTurbo Avedon, Nicole Ruggiero, Peggy Ahwesh, Santiago Tamayo Soler, Seth Price, and Victor Castaneda H.

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Designing the Infinite is organized by Museum Manager Rokhsane Hovaida, with Museum Education Coordinator Belen Torralba.

Support is provided by the California Center for the Arts, Escondido Foundation, with supporting sponsorship provided by Design Moe Kitchen & Bath.

Cassie McQuater, Angela’s Flood, 2020-21, 4K video. Image courtesy of the artist. Commissioned by Colección SOLO.