Love Is Real, and It’s Inside of Babeworld’s Computer

‘Love is Real, and it’s Inside Of My Computer’ is an exhibition by the intersectionally disabled collective Babeworld and sound artist utopian_realism that focuses on the social and administrative relationships present in projects commissioned by creative institutions. The show questions the art world’s capacity to support neurodivergent individuals and groups while also highlighting the mental burnout incurred by artists when navigating expectations. 

‘Love is Real …’ picks apart the possibility of selfcare in the artists’ day-to-day lives, where games have become work, and an elusive fictional project is rapidly metamorphosing into new forms provoked by unrelenting administrative requests. Heavy black curtains line the interior of Grand Union, enhancing the sense that the exhibition is focused on internal world-building. Mounted in the middle of the cloaked wall, violet light spilling out from its edges, a monitor displays words describing utopian_realism’s surrounding soundscape, including ethereal chimes and moments of quiet with ‘slowed down and stretched out whooshes’. In the centre of the gallery sits a large square structure, made from industrial stud-wall timber; inside is a contemporary live-work space with a gaming monitor on which screens the artists’ new film.

The interior walls of the space are a glossy pale pink, while a nearby lightbox approximates a window. We are invited to sit at the desk, facing the monitor, or on a sofa. Inside, the fixtures and adornments speak to Japanese anime, cosplay and gaming: wigs and plushies hang from rails and spill across the furniture and floor, while a carton of Ribena blackcurrant juice leaks a silicon replica of its contents onto the desk. The words ‘Love is Real, and it’s Inside Of My Computer’ appear on a hand-tufted rug, designed to emulate a CD, and on two posters pinned to the wall, overlapped with hearts and pinging message icons. In this environment, everything demands your attention.

On the monitor, a neurodivergently coded character (Babeworld’s preferred terminology) narrates directly to the camera as they attempt to fill a coffee pot and cycle through numerous glitches. A dialogue opens about how games reset a scene when an action fails. A plushie version of the videogame character Sonic the Hedgehog falls from an aeroplane with a crash, prompting the film’s narrator to say: ‘It’s not like some lovely cinematic natural awakening; it’s more like being smashed on the head with a hammer by my own thoughts.’ The collective autofiction of this film articulates tight cycles of events in which ordinary days drag and repeat with the setting and rising of the sun, accompanied by the pressure of realizing a project. 

Amidst these overwhelming cycles, the protagonist finds comfort in doomscrolling through social-media: images flash by of a baby skunk with a pink bow, the YouTuber Brian David Gilbert, a Hello Kitty Nintendo Dreamcast console. New project drafts emerge and die like mayflies in a wired, chronically online vortex. An Excel spreadsheet (the touchstone of all arts administration) promises the perfect, drab conditions from which a nascent idea might emerge.

Alongside the sly humour of the video, conventional artistic practice has retreated to fragmented feral activities on the walls beside the monitor, including a hand-etched mirror and a lampshade airbrushed with oceanic patterns. An A4 pencil drawing of musician SOPHIE and a tribute to Mamoru Oshii’s celebrated anime film Ghost in the Shell 2: Innocence (2004) are tacked to the wall. The strength of ‘Love is Real, and it’s Inside Of My Computer’ lies in how the work embeds generosity at its core, utilizing it to open active questions about what constitutes culture, who partakes in it, how it can be accessed and how the freedoms present in cultural spaces can be shared.

Babeworld and utopian_realism’s ‘Love is Real, and It’s Inside Of My Computer’ is on view at Grand Union, Birmingham, until 3 August

^{Main image: Babeworld and utopian_realism, ‘Love is Real, and It’s Inside Of My Computer’, 2024, exhibition view. Courtesy: the artists and Grand Union, Birmingham; photograph: Patrick Dandy}