Curator’s Bio
Nicholas O’Brien is an artist and writer making video games and digital animations addressing civic history, urban infrastructure, and overlooked narratives of technology and labor. O'Brien’s work has been exhibited at Now Play This (UK), Microscope Gallery (NYC), the Knockdown Center (NYC), LiMA Media Art Platform (NL), The Photographers Gallery (UK), WordPlay Festival (CA), and published his game The Last Survey with RedDeerGames on the Nintendo Switch. He lives and works in Brooklyn.
Participating Artists:
Angela Washko
Angela Washko is an artist who creates new forums for discussions about feminism. Washko’s practice spans interventions in mainstream media, performance art, video, and video games. She is committed to telling complex and unconventional stories about the media we consume from unusual perspectives. Since 2012, Washko has operated The Council on Gender Sensitivity and Behavioral Awareness in World of Warcraft, an ongoing intervention inside the most popular multiplayer online role-playing game. A recent recipient of the Impact Award at Indiecade, a Franklin Furnace Performance Fund Grant, and a Frank-Ratchye Fund for Art at the Frontier Grant, Washko’s practice has been highlighted in The New Yorker, Frieze Magazine, Time Magazine, The Guardian, Artforum, The Los Angeles Times, Art in America, The New York Times, and more. Her projects have been presented internationally at venues including Museum of the Moving Image, Kiasma Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles Museum of Contemporary Art, the Milan Design Triennale, the Shenzhen Independent Animation Biennial and the Rotterdam International Film Festival. Washko is an Assistant Professor of Art at Carnegie Mellon University.
Everest Pipkin
Everest Pipkin is a writer, game developer and software artist from Central Texas whose work follows themes of ecology, information theory, and system collapse. As an artist and as a theorist, they fundamentally believe in the liberatory capacity of care; care not as an abstract emotion but rather as a powerful force that motivates collective work towards a better world.
They hold a BFA from University of Texas at Austin, an MFA from Carnegie Mellon University, and live and work in southern New Mexico. They have shown and spoken at The Design Museum of London, The Texas Biennial, The XXI Triennale of Milan, The Photographers Gallery of London, Center for Land Use Interpretation, and other spaces. When not at the computer in the heat of the day, you can find them in the hills spending time with their neighbors— both human and non-human.
The Escape From Woomera Collective
The Escape From Woomera Collective comprised a group of game designers and developers from the Australian games industry, together with digital media artists and an investigative journalist. Team members included: Katharine Neil ('Kipper'), Kate Wild, Stephen Honegger, Justin Halliday, Ian Malcolm, Morgan Simpson, Andrea Blundell, Matthew Jones, David Jewsbury, Duncan Murray, Julian Oliver, Chris Markwart, Mark Angeli, Rani Kellock, Monique Jones and Alex McNeilly. For those working in the games industry, their involvement in this controversial project could only be revealed years later.
Porpentine Charity Heartscape
Porpentine Charity Heartscape is a writer, game designer, and dead swamp milf in Oakland. She is a 2016 Creative Capital Emerging Fields and 2016 Sundance Institute’s New Frontier Story Lab fellow, a 2017 Prix Net Art awardee, and has exhibited at the 2017 Whitney Biennial, EMP Museum, and the National Gallery of Denmark. She is a fellow with Tiptree and was commissioned by Vice and Rhizome.
Pippin Barr
Pippin Barr is a videogame maker, educator, and critic who lives and works in Montréal. He is an Associate Professor of Computation Arts at Concordia University and the Associate Director of the Technoculture, Art, and Games (TAG) Research Centre. Pippin is a prolific maker of videogames, producing work addressing everything from airplane safety instructions to contemporary art to the nature of videogames and videogame technologies. He has collaborated with diverse figures such as performance artist Marina Abramović, Twitter personality @seinfeld2000, and the International Federation for Human Rights. Pippin holds a Ph.D. in Computer Science from Victoria University of Wellington/Te Herenga Waka, with a dissertation that examined the mediation of values in videogames. He is a well-known figure in the independent and artistic videogame scenes, makes his source code and process documentation publicly available via his presence on GitHub, and his book, How to Play a Video Game, introduces the uninitiated and culturally curious to the world of video games.
Nathalie Lawhead
Nathalie Lawhead is a net-artist and award winning game designer that has been creating experimental digital art since the late 90's. Past works include titles such as the Webby winning Tetrageddon Games, MoMA featured "Everything is going to be OK", and the Electric Zine Maker. They are known for building experimental software, desktop pets, digital toys, and strange virtual contraptions.
Studio Oleomingus
Dhruv Jani is an author who works at the intersection of post-colonial writing, speculative architecture and interactive-fiction. As the founder of and principal artist at Studio Oleomingus, he uses videogames to study the many occlusions of colonial historiography. Over the last five years of work at the studio, he has remained deeply interested in examining the contours of colonial and imperial authority and its modern manifestations, and in the possible use of videogames spaces as sites of protest and reparation.
Robert Yang
Robert Yang makes surprisingly popular games about gay culture. He is most known for his historical bathroom sim The Tearoom and his homoerotic shower sim Rinse and Repeat, and his gay sex trilogy Radiator 2 has over 150,000 users on Steam. Previously he was an Assistant Arts Professor at NYU Game Center.
Jeremy Couillard
Jeremy Couillard was educated as a painter, and is a self-taught new media artist. He has made numerous well-received and internationally exhibited video, virtual reality, and video game works, accompanied by installations, paintings, and ephemera. His works often deploy humorous narratives about future dystopias to explore what motivates us as humans to work, live, and create. Jeremy Couillard was born in 1980 in Michigan. He received his MFA from Columbia University and his BA from Michigan State University. Couillard has exhibited at Denny Dimin Gallery (New York, NY), Phillips Auction House (New York, NY), yours, mine & ours gallery (New York, NY), Lincoln Center (New York, NY), Louis B. James (New York, NY), Zhulong Gallery (Dallas, TX), Flux Factory (Queens, NY). He has done numerous projects with Daata (London) and has screened his work at the New Museum and Rhizome (New York, NY), Times Square Arts’ Midnight Moment (New York, NY), The Bass Museum’s Soundscape Park (Miami, FL), Salon 94 (New York, NY), the Brooklyn Academy of Music (Brooklyn, NY), and the Warhol Museum (Pittsburgh, PA). Couillard’s work has been featured or reviewed in Artform, The New York Times, The New Yorker, Hyperallergic, Frieze Magazine, Art in America, VICE’s The Creators Project, The Washington Post, FAD, artnet news, ARTNews, the Huffington Post, and the Observer.