Video game characters rarely remain confined to the worlds that produced them. Through fan fiction, fan art, and other forms of collective production, they continue to circulate across images, stories, and online spaces, acquiring extended and sometimes unpredictable forms of life.

The exhibition stems from a fictional dialogue between two characters from different video games who reflect on their own forms of aliveness and on the fan works that reproduce and transform them. Their conversation turns to a small misprint in Hito Steyerl’s essay A Thing Like You and Me, where the word “message” appears as “massage”. The slip becomes a productive metaphor. 

Here, massage suggests a mode of contact between the virtual and the physical: a diffuse and embodied form of influence. Rather than asking what these virtual bodies are, the project reflects on how they might register in the world through pressure, sensation, and subtle points of contact between images and living bodies.