MOCA Cleveland presents a new body of work by Simon Denny (1982, Auckland, New Zealand) that includes sculptures, paintings, and  prints that explore emergent business philosophies from the technology sector through the visual language of board games.

Reflecting on the popularity of board games, and resonant with game theory’s influence on the technology sector, these works remap board games with narratives from radical and influential texts like Peter Thiel’s Zero to One and the libertarian book The Sovereign Individual. For example, Settlers of Catan, the favorite board game of tech entrepreneur and founder of LinkedIn Reid Hoffman is re-imagined as a story of expansion where players “settle, trade, and build” from a decaying earth to New Zealand, then out to international waters to found an ocean nation, and finally into outerspace.

Simon Denny: The Founder’s Paradox presents newly prominent mythologies about the entrepreneurial “founder” and the role of the nation state in a libertarian future that collides with fantasy imagery, expansionist ambition, and political ideology. These narratives are present within innovations like Bitcoin and emergent platform monopolies enabled by the effects of big data and Web 2.0.

This project also includes collaborative works that explore the intersection of technology and management through a seminar and workshop led by Denny and Youngjin Yoo, Professor at the Weatherhead School of Management, Case Western Reserve University, with Patrick Barrett, Adjunct Professor at The Cleveland Institute of Art. With MBA students and Design students Denny will produce designs for board games that investigate the impact technologies might have on industries —transportation, healthcare and housing as they meet Augmented Reality, blockchain and big data.