Small Void by Alice Bucknell is now on view and playable as a part of ’Soft Robots’ group show at Copenhagen Contemporary until 31 December.
'Soft Robots' exhibition curated by Marie Laurberg is inspired by Hans Christian Andersen’s The Nightingale (1843), written at the onset of the Industrial Revolution. The exhibition presents works by various artists looking at life in the new technological ecology, questioning the future we are shaping for ourselves. Created with or without new technology, they show art’s capacity to explore the world through poetry. Read more about the exhibition here.
Alice Bucknell’s Small Void (2025) is a cooperative two-player “call and response” game exploring the limits of language, attachment theory and cosmic annihilation. Developed through the Collide residency program between Arts at CERN and Copenhagen Contemporary, the game’s mechanics are inspired by the paradoxes of black holes and quantum entanglement, and conceived in dialog with theoretical physicists at CERN. The game’s world, meanwhile, is inspired by the aliens beneath our feet—lichens—and the macro-micro, one-many, inside-outside, and living-dead confusion that their very existence instates. Small Void is also a queer dating sim about the frictions and expansions of identity that love induces, breakdowns of communication, and the ways a world, as an active agent or player, transforms all beings who move through it.
The game is developed in collaboration with Jonathan Coryn, scored by Madga Drozd, features a custom typeface by Daytona Mess, and was produced with the support of Vincent Moulinet.
Installation views by David Stjernholm.
June 20, 2025
