Fountain 1917

The video game adaptation of the infamous Dadaist anti-art sculpture, Fountain 1917 pushes the boundaries of what a video game can even be. Is it an open-world simulation sandbox? Is it more pretentious art game nonsense? Is it a derivative of LibreOffice® Calc? Judge for yourself.

In 1917, an artist working under the pseudonym “Richard Mutt” detonated the idea of a boundary between art and non-art with his sculpture Fountain. When he purchased it, it was just a urinal, but by the time he had set it down on its back, signed it, and submitted it to an art exhibition, it was a sculpture. Fountain 1917, similarly, takes the free and open-source spreadsheet software LibreOffice® Calc and recontextualizes it as a video game.

The historical consensus is that “Richard Mutt” was Marcel Duchamp, although some people argue “Richard Mutt” was instead Baroness Elsa von Freytag-Loringhoven; both artists were active in the New York Dada movement and made sculptures out of everyday objects. Duchamp called his found object sculptures “readymades,” because the physical objects were purchased off the shelf and usually mass-produced, and all he had to do was select them, sometimes lightly alter them, and title them. Fountain 1917 adapts this concept to form a readymade video game.

The Society of Independent Artists promised to show all the art that was submitted, but when Fountain was sent in, many of the board members were outraged; in lieu of rejecting it outright, they hid it behind a partition. Fountain 1917 follows in these footsteps, too: when it was submitted to the leading PC game store, it was found “not a good fit” and rejected.

There would be no Fountain 1917 without LibreOffice and the many people who have contributed to it and its predecessors stretching all the way back to 1985. As such, Somnolent Succulent Studio LLC will donate 90% of its revenue from Fountain 1917 to The Document Foundation to support ongoing development of LibreOffice.

For more information, see the Fountain 1917 website.