Laura C. Schmidt is a curator for games and digital art at ZKM | Center for Art and Media Karlsruhe where her practice focuses on the intersection of media art, gaming and digital culture. She holds a B.A. in Fine Arts from the Universidad Complutense de Madrid, Spain, and an M.A. in Multimedia and Visual Arts from the Universidad Politécnica de Valencia, Spain. She also studied Interaction Design at the University of Applied Sciences Joanneum in Graz, Austria, and Public Interest Design at the University of Wuppertal, Germany.
Exhibiting games at ZKM | Center for Art and Media Karlsruhe
FROG 2026 – Talk
The ZKM | Center for Art and Media Karlsruhe is a public cultural institution which since its founding in 1989 stands worldwide for an open concept of art in the digital age.
Whether through exhibitions, symposia, publications, concert programs or digital formats, the ZKM promotes a program of interdisciplinary projects and international collaborations at the intersection of art, technology, society, science, and politics.
With the opening of the exhibition »The World of Games« in the of fall 1997, video games became an integral part of this work, making ZKM one of the first art institutions worldwide to offer video game culture a permanent public platform within an artistic context.
Since that time, the presentation of games and game-related projects has been repeatedly redesigned in a series of different exhibitions, leading to the current edition, »zkm_gameplay. the next level«. With around 80 exhibits from 1972 to the present day – most of them playable – visitors are invited to experience the cultural phenomenon up close.
But what does it actually mean to work with such an interactive and digital medium in an exhibition context? Drawing on concrete experiences from the institution’s practice, the talk offers insights into the day-to-day work with games and the challenges of exhibiting and collecting them. The focus here is less on providing universally applicable answers and more on offering an open look into processes, decisions, and everyday negotiations.