Connor Gottfried: Play Is a Serious Language

Connor Gottfried is a Canadian artist, engineer, and musician from Calgary whose sculptures do something no other work in contemporary art quite does: they play. His father brought home an Apple II computer and changed the course of his life. He was five years old. That encounter, the wonder of a screen doing something responsive and alive, planted something in him that never left.

His sculptures are built from aluminum composite panelling, laser-cut acrylic, and embedded electronics housing fully playable retro game consoles. But to describe them by their materials is to miss the point entirely. Gottfried has said that there will never be another generation who experiences the innocent relationship to technology that his generation had in their youth.

These sculptures are made from that understanding. They are not celebrations of gaming. They are elegies for a particular kind of wonder that existed before the world became entirely digital and entirely exhausting. He has described the works as bridge objects, in the process of becoming, capturing the childhood that a whole generation shared with technology before either grew up.