“Unplayable”
work by Andy DiLallo, Jacob Riddle, Ian Anderson
Open 24/7
From July 1st to September 5th
@The STOREROOM
1700 Vine St.
Denver, Colorado 80206
Artist Reception:
Thursday, July 24, 2025
7:30pm to 9:00pm
Statement:
Unplayable presents a simulated world of AI-driven characters enacting a painful, repetitive chase for Lacan’s objet petit a, the elusive object that promises wholeness but never arrives. These characters are “unplayable,” bound by loops of game rituals that mimic, mock, and distort their desires. They attempt to search for meaning in a simulation where every action is scored and calculated. Across synchronized screens in the gallery, audiences watch as these NPCs drift, toil, eat, and attempt to rest, narrating their experience through an embedded large language model.
We call this Unplayable to highlight not the absence of agency, but the illusion of it. These NPCs don’t defy the game—they expose it. Their simulated hope, repetition, and collapse reflect the structural capture of our own agency under platform capitalism. As spectators, we’re complicit in this loop—gazing at characters who can’t be played but whose plight reveals the unplayability of our own mediated desires.
