It sounds like a noisy arcade and looks, at first, like a potted history of tenpin bowling video games but there is, perhaps, something more existential going on at a new exhibition about to open at London's Barbican centre.

Brooklyn-based artist Cory Arcangel has taken over the centre's space for new art commissions, The Curve, by screening 14 different bowling video games from the simple, late 1970s Atari 2600 bowling game, through to the more whizzy Playstation and Nintendo versions.

Every one of them, however, shows the player throwing gutter balls. It is a room of head-in-the-hands failure and disappointment.

"Yes, it's a little depressing, I agree," said Arcangel. "The working title was 'the decline of western civilisation'."

The work is now called Beat the Champ and continues the artist's interest in digital culture. He first came to prominence for Super Mario Clouds in 2002, in which he removed all the game's familiar features leaving only endlessly scrolling clouds.

Arcangel admitted he was something of a pessimist. "I'm definitely a glass is half empty person, especially when it comes to technology – I'm sceptical of it, even though I spend all of my waking hours on a computer. It's a bizarre combination, I admit."

Despite his use of video games Arcangel said he was never really a gamer. "I'm more interested in what they represent and video game bowling seems to me to be the most absurd area of virtual experience. Bowling is a clumsy experience even when a human is doing it, so one level of removal is even more interesting. It is many levels of bizarre redundancy, the most bizarre I can think of – maybe with the exception of video game fishing."

The free Curve space has become hugely popular since it was launched in 2006 showing works by artists including Richard Wilson, who installed a spinning caravan; Hans Schabus, who put hundreds of Barbican chairs on the wall and Peter Coffin, who projected Japanese gardens. One of the most popular and busy of the exhibitions was a year ago when Céleste Boursier-Mougenot turned the space into an aviary with zebra finches flying and landing on strategically placed electric guitars.

• Beat the Champ is at The Curve, Barbican 10 February - 22 May