This is the supplementary material to the doctoral exegesis "Game Engines and the Gesamtkunstwerk: Reimagining the 1920s Avant-Garde Total Work of Art in Contemporary Art Practice" by Guy Lobwein. The research is concerned with how the mass proliferation of virtual spaces in contemporary society profoundly effects the daily lives of billions of people. Here, game engines are key technologies in the future spatial development of these digital transformations and have only recently become accessible for contemporary artists to expand the language of their use. It explores the relationship between contemporary artists, virtual spaces, and game engines, has distinct similarities to the 1920s, where avant-garde artists were searching for ways to critically respond to the technological and social changes of their period. The idea of the Gesamtkunstwerk (Total Work of Art), as a model for interdisciplinary and immersive art practice, emerged as a creatively productive zone for the avant-garde to reflect on these transformations. Currently, little discourse has considered how these historical avant-garde approaches to the Gesamtkunstwerk could also act as a highly-relevant creative and critical context for contemporary digital artists using game engines to respond to the current state of digital immersivity. This practice-led research project combines these historical contexts with more recent critical perspectives in digital theory to reconsider how an experimental art practice using game engines can create reflective experiences of virtual spaces and new understandings of our digitised societies.
