Connor Gottfried New Worlds For Sale

About this work

New Worlds is a sculptural work created by Connor Gottfried in 2025, comprising aluminum composite panelling, an 8-inch IPS screen, a Raspberry Pi running a SNES emulator with the Super Mario World ROM, an original SNES controller, and a 3D-printed controller wall mount. The work measures 24 × 37 × 6 inches. The title—evoking the rhetoric of discovery, exploration, and the expansion of known territory—is set in pointed dialogue with its source material: Super Mario World, released by Nintendo in 1990 as a launch title for the Super Nintendo Entertainment System, and one of the most widely played and culturally significant video games in the medium's history. Super Mario World takes as its setting a fantastical terrain—Dinosaur Land—mapped in a series of interconnected levels that must be discovered and navigated by the player. Gottfried's decision to embed this geography within a wall-mounted sculptural object recontextualises the game's cartographic and exploratory logic as an art-world proposition: the new worlds of the title are simultaneously the levels of the game, the terrain of contemporary artistic practice, and the broader cultural and digital landscapes that Gottfried's work navigates. The original SNES controller, mounted on the wall beside the screen, invites the viewer to participate—to become, briefly, an explorer. The aluminum composite panel support, IPS screen, and Raspberry Pi hardware constitute a kind of portable archaeology: the technology of 2025 is conscripted to preserve and display the technology of 1990, in a formal act of conservation that mirrors the work of the wider emulation community. New Worlds is a work about the persistence of joy—the specific, irreplaceable joy of Super Mario World—and about the lengths to which human beings will go to sustain it. It is among the most formally inventive and emotionally resonant works in Gottfried's debut body of work.