A blocky blank canvas: how Minecraft is inspiring a new wave of art and design

One can make the case that Minecraft has facilitated more creativity than any other work of art in human history. On YouTube, the game is the subject of more than one trillion hours of content, ranging from machinima animations to exacting recreations of some of the world’s most famous architectural works, real or otherwise. The game’s blocky aesthetic has seeped into the real world: luxury fashion house Loewe’s odd, pixelated capsule collection; housing in South Korea that, truth be told, looks like the kind of abodes newbie players might build in their first few hours in the Overworld. Like Fortnite and Roblox, Minecraft isn’t just a game but a platform – a beguiling digital portal into many different worlds shaped by the imagination of their makers. This goes some way to explaining why the game has sold over 300 million copies in just over 15 years and is showing few, if any, signs of waning popularity.

Creative opportunities flow from Minecraft’s open structure. Players can participate in the classically video-game-like “Survival Mode” but they can also do whatever they want in the game’s “Creative Mode,” which removes all threats in the game. Digitally savvy art institutions jumped on the game in the 2010s: Tate teamed up with Minecraft to produce a series of maps inspired by famed artworks such as André Derain’s The Pool of London. In 2016, Liverpool Biennial aimed to produce, at the time, the world’s largest virtual sculpture in the game.

The generative artist, designer, and educator Travess Smalley, who has been playing Minecraft since 2014, takes inspiration from the sandbox adventure, albeit in an unusual way compared to the works most commonly inspired by it. Travess, assistant professor in print media at the University of Rhode Island, is not interested in creating blocky versions of real-life work, like “Pikachus up in the sky,” he says. Rather, Travess is influenced by the game’s “generative aspects of play” – the subtly randomised beauty of each new procedurally generated world and the plethora of creative opportunities hardcoded into the game’s playful mechanics.

Travess’ artistic practice straddles both digital and analogue processes: running scripts through Photoshop, printing images out, running them through the computer again. His best known series of works is perhaps Pixel Rugs, a series housed mostly on the internet. A few pieces have also been made into lavish physical pieces using traditional weaving techniques. The digital versions of Pixel Rugs are dense, psychedelic lattice-works of glitching degradation; their physical, IRL counterparts resemble QR codes of dazzling complexity.

Travess says playing Minecraft was a defining moment in his art practice. He already liked art that “existed in a world of iteration” such as Brian Eno’s music; he was already experimenting with generative scripts. But Minecraft “made everything click to a whole other level”.

In 2020, as the world transitioned to increasingly digital interfaces because of the Covid-19 pandemic, Travess’ practice came full circle. He became artist-in-residence of Minecraft for the MacKenzie Art Gallery alongside three other artists who were all required to spend time in the game over a two-month period and create virtual exhibitions responding to it – called Ender Gallery. The work Travess produced reskinned every block in the game, replacing the original textures (grass, stone, dirt, etc) with fragments of text from the game’s legendary End Poem. Thus, Travess transformed Minecraft from a blocky natural paradise into what he describes as a “procedurally generated, never-ending concrete poem” — a meditation on both how language shapes the world and the generative nature of language itself.

The endlessly variable environments that Minecraft produces are reflected in the boundless experiences it offers players. Alongside your fantasy adventuring fare, Minecraft players have pogoed to the likes of Charli XCX, 100 Gecs, and American Football in virtual festivals. Graphic designer Elliot Ulm found inspiration in a more low-key set of events: the time he discovered a parent and child living in a mud hut. Ulm befriended them, mined for them, watched the child grow into an adult, and then, in collaboration with Minecraft, commemorated the experience in a poster anchored around the text, “our time together was endless”. The sentiment will be sweetly relatable for many players.

For the musician Sam Bell, it is the “pastoral” sense of peace and quiet which influenced the tone of his recently released album, Glint, what he describes as a “reimagined soundtrack” for the game. “They added big mountains and valleys but most of the time, you’re going to find yourself in a field,” he says. “There’s flowers, maybe a cow, and a small oak tree.”

Sam’s music, a restrained and soothing mix of ambient pads and plaintive piano, is beautifully spacious. It reflects a game in which there are large stretches of silence. When the soundtrack does eventually filter back in, usually at “just the right moment,” says Sam, it can feel intensely emotional. For all its tranquillity, Sam’s album, partly inspired by journeys he took in the game with friends, evokes the varied emotional register of playing Minecraft. “I Think We Can See Our Houses Up Here!” is both understated, comforting, and filled with a gentle sense of awe. Summoning an image of returning to his Minecraft home, Sam conveys the powerful sense of belonging and security that one can feel in a digital world.

Because of the global pandemic in 2020, video games ideas and aesthetics have penetrated culture to a greater extent than ever before. Luxury fashion house Balenciaga created a genuinely cool video game to show off its fall 2021 collection; the same year, “main character energy” dominated social media feeds. Video games now shape real life just as much as real life feeds into them. The same can be said of Minecraft, visual art, and design.

According to Sam, the fundamental act of being creative in Minecraft, isn’t really that different to other creative outlets — either those mediated through the screen or which happen outside of it. Actually, the structure, simplicity and limitations of the game’s design can aid creativity, which is perhaps a useful lesson in and of itself. “There are infinite possibilities, but I don’t think it ever feels overwhelming,” says Sam, who enjoys not having access to every block and material at the game’s outset. The beauty of Minecraft, he continues, is that “you can really see this big journey, creative or otherwise, stretching out ahead of you”.