Thirty screen works put games and film in the same room
Onassis ONX hung prototypes beside finished video, arguing that one pipeline—engines, AI tooling, circulation—now shapes both.
For four days in June, Onassis ONX in New York hung thirty screen-based works—over twelve hours of them—in one space and declined to say which were films and which were games. ONX Screens, the organization's new program for what the announcement called projects "built for the speed, circulation, and shared languages of digital culture," ran June 4–7, with videogame cosplay encouraged at the opening and prototypes and works-in-progress explicitly welcome.
The premise deserves attention even with the show closed: moving image and videogames, the argument goes, are now shaped by the same forces—game engines, AI tooling, virtual production, platform-native aesthetics—and by circulation itself, so the screen should be treated as "both medium and infrastructure." That is a curatorial claim you could argue with, if the lineup didn't keep proving it.
Consider who showed up. Tomo Kihara and Playfool brought Deviation Game—we profiled Kihara in August. Wendi Yan and Yi Xie showed Inner Carbon, the Daoist-alchemy work we just wrote about this week. Peter Burr showed Interstitial Maintenance. And Auriea Harvey and Michael Samyn appeared together with The Cosmos and The Cave—a decade after Tale of Tales told the world it was done making videogames, the pair is back on a wall of screens in a room that treats play as ordinary art.
The lineup posters: video game works and moving image works, one program. Images: Onassis ONX
Exhibitions end; sorting mechanisms persist. What ONX built reads like infrastructure for the long run—not a games showcase, just a room where an engine prototype and a film share a wall because they already share a pipeline.
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