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Cis Penance is on display this weekend at Heart Projector's pop-up arcade at the University of British Columbia in Vancouver, BC. This is part of the Games in Action conference, the largest event organized on UBC campus focused on video games and their impacts on our social and political world. I can't be there in person, but I will be attending the conference virtually online. For more details see https://gamesinaction.squarespace.com/ -
Final week of Platform 19
I’ve gone to Vancouver for a month, but theSite Gallery show continues for another few days! It’s been reviewed in The Guardian and The Quietus, and more than one visitor has described Empty Carriage, my interactive piece in a modified vintage pram, as some variation of “mindblowing” or “a head fuck”. www.instagram.com/p/B1jVTGk… Since those reviews came out, I commissioned Jennifer Booth to run a workshop charting queer life paths in the form of a long collage, which is now hanging on the wall of the work space in the gallery. -
AMAZE Berlin events, including talk with Squinky!
I’ll be in Berlin next week for some cool events connected to the Rainbow Arcade exhibition at the Schwules Museum, as part of AMAZE festival. Come along and/or let me know if you want to hang out! Rainbow Arcade meetup Monday, April 8 • 14:00 - 18:00 Not sure I can get to this with my flight, but thought I would list it here anyway as it looks nice - details are on the Games Week Berlin website. -
Postmortem: Hanging textile for Interactive Portraits by Anne Smithies
[gallery ids=“3216,3215,3214,3213,3212,3211,3210,3209,3208,3207” type=“rectangular” link=“file”] In the post about Festival of the Mind Futurecade, I mentioned this collaboration with Anne Smithies on a gorgeous, huge textile to accompany my interactive portraits. I first approached Anne about this because of a chat I had in Tokyo with Zep, the maker of the Pico-8 platform that I’ve been working with to make these small software pieces - we were chatting about how a particular graphics feature he’d introduced to the platform a few months earlier was giving works a textile-like quality to them, as you could now build landscapes out of 4x4 repeating pixel patterns. -
Mozilla Festival
My work is being displayed at Mozilla festival, for the Art + Data exhibition. The Art+Data experience — part of the Mozilla Artists Open Web project — engages artists, designers, technologists, and researchers in an artistic exploration of a healthy web. With an online gallery (https://foundation.mozilla.org/opportunity/artists-open-web) and an exhibition during MozFest, Art+Data will also feature artists in residencies (on site and online) and creative, interactive sessions. Thirty-six art projects will be showcased, and all (including digital and analogue processes) will focus on data knowledge and usage. -
Festival of the Mind
[gallery ids=“3178,3177,3176,3175,3180,3197,3198,3199,3200,3201,3202,3203” type=“rectangular” link=“file”] Last month, the first five of my interactive portraits were included in Futurecade in the Sheffield Millennium Gallery, as part of the University of Sheffield’s Festival of the Mind. These are kind of like a cross between Tamagotchi and an RPG dialogue system, and they present dialogue taken verbatim from interviews I carried out with transgender people in Japan as part of the Creator Ikusei residency. I’m going to make 13 in total, six of which are supported by Arts Council funding via the Making Ways project. -
Dublin Fringe Queer Oasis
This week I’m presenting work at the Dublin Fringe festival as part of the Fully Automated Luxury Gender Oasis by Trans Live Art Salon. I’m giving a reading of my chapter from the Queer Game Studies book on Friday, and I’m also exhibiting my interactive fiction piece “Elixir”. I’m super excited to be involved in a project that explicitly calls for utopian queer marxist world building! Here’s a piece in the Dublin Inquirer where they talk about it -
Dublin Fringe Queer Oasis
This week I’m presenting work at the Dublin Fringe festival as part of the Fully Automated Luxury Gender Oasis by Trans Live Art Salon. I’m giving a reading of my chapter from the Queer Game Studies book on Friday, and I’m also exhibiting my interactive fiction piece “Elixir”. I’m super excited to be involved in a project that explicitly calls for utopian queer marxist world building! Here’s a piece in the Dublin Inquirer where they talk about it -
Vancouver! Residency? Desk space?
Location: Vancouver, BC Dates: 2 months between November 2016 and March 2017 Requirements: Desk space. Nothing else! I'm currently making plans for a trip to Vancouver. While there, I would like to spend a couple of months embedded in a place where people do cool things. This could be a school, a startup, a community centre... I'm pretty open-minded about the form it would take. Maybe you have some random space that feels a bit dusty and unused. -
Post-genesem: Alien Flora
[gallery type=“slideshow” size=“large” ids=“2079,2080,2075,2084”] It’s common practice in games to write up a “post-mortem” of a project after it has been completed. Here the launch of a game is treated as the death of the development project; the social life of the game as it is circulated in the wider world and played by people unknown to the developer is figured as a kind of after-life. An alternative to the “post-mortem” was proposed by, I think, Anna Anthropy, who began to use the term “post-partum” instead; the release of a game is a birthing, its development a kind of pregnancy, the software beta a fetus whose basic characteristics are identifiable but whose body is still preparing for extrauterine life, under the care of its developer. -
Alien Flora games: Orchids to Dusk
[su_animate type=“fadeInUp” delay=“1”]From the 12th to the 14th May (i.e. this Thursday to Saturday) I am putting on a small exhibition of art games at the Buzz gallery in Rotherham for three days. It’s an informal little installation that I’m doing thanks to Rotherham Open Arts Renaissance, which has made some town-centre space available to members for short residency-like activities. One of the games I’m showing is Orchids to Dusk by Pol Clarissou. -
Alien Flora games: Prune
[su_animate type=“fadeInUp” delay=“1”]From the 12th to the 14th May (i.e. this Thursday to Saturday) I am putting on a small exhibition of art games at the Buzz gallery in Rotherham for three days. It’s an informal little event that I’m doing thanks to Rotherham Open Arts Renaissance, which has made some town-centre space available to members for short residency-like activities. One of the games I’m showing is Prune by Joel McDonald. -
Alien Flora games: Strawberry Cubes
[su_animate type=“fadeIn” delay=“1”]//eventbrite.com/tickets-external?eid=25032806799&ref=etckt[/su_animate] [su_animate type=“fadeInUp” delay=“1”]From the 12th to the 14th May (i.e. next Thursday to Saturday) I am putting on a small exhibition of art games at the Buzz gallery in Rotherham for three days. It’s an informal little event that I’m doing thanks to Rotherham Open Arts Renaissance, which has made some town-centre space available to members for short residency-like activities. One of the games I’m showing is Strawberry Cubes by Loren Schmidt. -
Custom-made watch - trading time
I help artists and designers bring their work to life using digital technologies. If you want to bring electronics into your art or design work, let's have a chat.
RCA Architecture Master’s student Simon Moxey hired me to make a watch for his show. The catch was, this would be no ordinary watch. It was to tell the time in microseconds, display stock market indexes, indicate increase and decrease in stock value and show international time zones. I advised him on hardware and then programmed it, and he created the casing.
The watch was an artefact from a fictional future in which the stock exchange is moved from London to Slough. Simon was proposing a scenario whereby the financial sector existed apart from the cultural and historical burden of the City of London. How would Slough adapt if the town’s main cultural entity was the stock exchange?
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What is an image board? Reflections on Image Threads
I’ve just taken down the Image Threads installation that I described in my last post. It wasn’t a fabulous success, but it was enough to give me some reflections on two issues:- Why interactive installations are difficult to set up
- What is an image board
I’ll start on an up-note. While the contributions to the installation were very limited in number, those that did come up towards the end of the installation period were quite interesting in terms of how people made use of the medium. While the system was designed to replicate the topic-threads of web-based image boards, the realisation of the system in a three-dimensional environment led to three-dimensional, cross-thread references.
