Tsardom 3.10.

2024 – ongoing
In-game photography
Game Boy Camera, RGB trichrome reconstruction
Photographic transfer on hexagonal ceramic tiles / variable installation dimensions

Tsardom 3.10. looks at Russian-made video games as machines for producing territory. Inside them, land is never neutral: it appears as a map, a battlefield, a homeland, a resource, a checkpoint, a kingdom, an objective.

Using a Game Boy Camera and RGB trichrome reconstruction, Zmeyev turns game images into hexagonal ceramic tiles. The screenshot leaves the screen and becomes a piece of floor: something that can be laid, repeated, joined and walked over. War, folklore and state power are no longer only represented. They are arranged as a surface.

A game does not only show a world. It teaches a player how to enter one, move through it, read it, use it and mistake it for something claimable.

In Tsardom 3.10., Maxim Zmeyev examines Russian-made video games as systems that turn territory into action. A village becomes a route. A field becomes a front line. A checkpoint becomes a threshold. A body becomes a target, a hero, a glitch or a monument. History does not appear as memory; it becomes level design.

The images are produced through a deliberately unstable process. Zmeyev re-photographs game images with a Game Boy Camera through red, green and blue filters, then recomposes the three channels into trichrome colour photographs. The process passes through the RGB structure of the screen, the coarse resolution of the Game Boy Camera and the colour-separation logic associated with Sergey Prokudin-Gorsky’s photographic work across the Russian Empire. But the project is not about reviving a historical technique. It uses that technique to turn an imperial way of looking back onto contemporary game worlds.

What matters is the surface. In these games, territory is not background. It is something to cross, defend, cleanse, restore, occupy or lose. Made from a position of forced displacement, the project cannot treat occupation as an abstract game mechanic. It looks at how the fantasy of taking land persists as image, rule, mission and pleasure.

The camera is not pointed at the “enemy” inside the game. It is turned towards the game itself — towards the way the game frames land as destiny, violence as movement and power as navigation.

The selected images form a broken inventory of this visual order: aircraft marked with red stars over snow-covered battlefields; soldiers and partisans; watchtowers, fences and checkpoints; skeletons in gas masks around a fire; an unexploded bomb embedded in the ground; a body thrown into the air by a glitch; monumental groups with red flags; fairy-tale figures standing at the edge of passage. These scenes do not deliver one ideological message. They show how ideology becomes spatial: how it enters maps, missions, gestures, horizons and routes.

Low resolution does not make these images innocent. It makes them unstable. Bodies dissolve into pixels. Colours slip out of register. Symbols survive as stains, signals, flags, halos, wounds. The image begins to resemble a damaged archive, a military board, a surveillance fragment, a fairy tale seen through a broken screen.

The final form of the project pushes the image out of the frame. Each photograph is conceived as a hexagonal ceramic tile: a cell, a module, a unit of terrain. The hexagon refers to strategy-game maps, war-game boards, territorial grids and domestic floors. This shift matters. A picture asks to be looked at. A tile asks to be laid, joined, repeated, walked over. The image becomes architecture; architecture becomes occupation.

In ceramic form, the work also becomes uncomfortably decorative. War is no longer only an event on a screen or a memory in an archive. It enters the language of floors, interiors, thresholds, corridors, staircases — the ordinary surfaces through which bodies move every day. The project does not monumentalise violence. It domesticates the image of violence in order to expose that domestication.

The title condenses the structure of the work. Tsardom refers to the “thirtieth kingdom” of Slavic folklore — the distant realm beyond the border, where the hero enters trials and encounters power in transformed or disguised forms. 3 marks Zmeyev’s third project with in-game photography and the three colour channels of the trichrome process. 10 points to the intended final number of images and echoes the numerical logic of the fairy-tale kingdom.

Tsardom 3.10. asks not what Russian-made games say about war, but where the game must end. A map can turn land into a surface; a mission can make violence look like movement; an image can make conquest appear ordered, beautiful, almost harmless. Reality does not allow that distance. Territory is never empty, never only playable: it is someone’s home, someone’s body, someone’s language, someone’s right to remain. No kingdom is worth that erasure.