The Russian Pavilion continues to investigate alternative forms of institution-making and world-building through the lens of video games and digital environments. Video games are quintessential social environments and representational systems, where specific relationships emerge, and its users borrow familiar tropes from the physical world in order to experience, comprehend and interpret its virtual counterpart. As such, digital environments possess a strong social potential as spaces of exploration and experimentation, where the norms, rules, and biases of the physical world can be temporarily suspended, and alternative futures imagined.

The gaming room hosts a selection of videogames and reflects on the collective relevance of digital environments, specifically within the context of Russia - one of the world's largest video games markets. Visitors are invited to play three video games by Russian artists: Sanatorium Anthropocene Retreat. Online Sessions (2021) by Mikahil Maximov and commissioned by the Russian Pavilion; It's Winter (2020) by Ilia Mazo; and Yuha's Nightmares (2021) by Yulia Kozhemyako (aka Supr). The three games are accompanied by seven theoretical contributions, reflecting on the Russian gaming scene as well as more speculative insights into video games and digital environments from an architectural, philosophical, and socio-political standpoint. Contributors: Alice Bucknell, Federico Campagna, Emanuele Coccia, Cat Goodfellow, Daria Kalugina, Alina Nazmeeva, Alexander Vetushinsky.

Expanding the conversation further, a digital takeover program invites gaming experts, game developers, philosophers, sociologists, and cultural practitioners to the Russian Pavilion through a variety of formats, including a game jam, performance lectures, panel conversations, Let's Play events and Twitch-takeovers. These conversations will be streamed within the gaming room and also feature on pavilionrus.com, acting as the digital counterpart of the physical pavilion.

The film programme Into the Sandbox, curated by Vladimir Nadein, examines the intersection of cinematography, game engines, digital environments and processes of gamification. Expanding the conversation further, a digital takeover program invites gaming experts, game developers, philosophers, sociologists, and cultural practitioners to the Russian Pavilion through a variety of formats, including a game jam, performance lectures, panel conversations, Let's Play events and Twitch-takeovers. These conversations will be streamed within the gaming room and also feature on pavilionrus.com, acting as the digital counterpart of the physical pavilion.