A quick note that my book Delay: Paying Attention to Energy Mechanics is in the itch.io Bundle for Ukraine, which has already raised $5.5 million for the charities International Medical Corps and Voices of Children. The bundle includes content from 736 creators, making it an incredible way to get hold of a huge collection of indie games and other material hosted on itch.io, while supporting charities responding under the horrifying conditions of Russia’s senseless war. Please give it your support:
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Sheffield Theatres Bank Cohort
I’m delighted to share that I’m one of a number of artists receiving support from Sheffield Theatres for the next year as part of the Bank Cohort! I’ll be building on some of the work I did last year, and trying out some new ideas, as well as finding new ways to do fun things with theatre and games. I’m incredibly pleased, and very uplifted by the warmth and openness of the folks at Sheffield Theatres. Huge thanks!
The Bank is a dedicated hub for talent development; this is the second cohort to be supported by Sheffield Theatres.
The artists will be offered bespoke support, training, artistic opportunities and professional development. The three directors are: Callum Berridge, Shreya Patel and Alexandra Whiteley, who will enjoy a host of opportunities including working as an assistant director on a Sheffield Theatres’ production. The three producers are: Beck Gadsby, Lydia Harrison and Katrina Woolley, who will receive mentoring, as well as seed funding to develop an idea, event or production using The Bank as their base, drawing on the support of the producing team at Sheffield Theatres. The three writers are: Nicole Joseph, Jasmin Mandi-Ghomi and Chloe Wade, who will benefit from masterclasses and mentoring as well as having the opportunity to undertake a research and development process with their writing. The four remaining artists each work in different theatre-based disciplines: Tommo Fowler is a dramaturg, Jennifer Jackson is a theatre maker and movement director / choreographer, Jose Guillermo Puello is a sound designer / composer and Zoyander Street is an artist-researcher and theatre maker. They will all receive tailored support in their fields.
Caroline Sinders: Feminist Data Set
I’m excited to be in conversation with Caroline Sinders this Saturday at Site Gallery, in the final event of their Digital Residency. Caroline’s art research practice addresses the potentials and injustices of tech, with a focus on exploring liberatory alternatives to the extractive big data industry. Sign up here.
Also, earlier that day, I’ll be hosting another in-conversation event at Typeset, between author Tair Rafiq and Dr. David Hartley, co-founder of the Narratives of Neurodiversity Network. Find out more and get a free ticket (in person or online) here.
Site Gallery, Sheffield, S1 2BS
Sat 4th December 2021
For the final event in the Feminist Data Set workshop series with digital resident Caroline Sinders, we are pleased to welcome Caroline to Sheffield for a special in-person event at Site Gallery.
Since July, Caroline has been working with Site Gallery to bring new voices to the Feminist Data Set project, through online workshops with Site Gallery audiences and discussion sessions with a selection of special international guest speakers. For this session, Caroline is joined by Rotherham-based artist Zoyander Street, who will share insights into their own research and practices and how they intersect with the interests of Feminist Data Set.
Feminist Data Set is a multi-year project that interrogates every step of the AI process that includes data collection, data labeling, data training, selecting an algorithm to use, the algorithmic model, and then designing how the model is then placed into a chat bot (and what the chatbot looks like). Every step exists to question and analyze the pipeline of creating using machine learning—is each step feminist, is it intersectional, does each step have bias and how can that bias be removed?
Squinky Collab live performance next week!
The interactive live performance of my collab project with Squinky is next week, and tickets are still available! Details below.
About this event
Video Call Calamity is an online interactive play about the awkwardness of video calls, and the scripts and protocols that we use to try to pass as ‘normal’.
Audience members are invited (but not forced!) to take on the roles of two of the main characters, while the rest of the audience creates the script live, through voting and text chat. Expect some big feelings, uncomfortable silences, and unsolicited rants about queerness and neurodiversity.
While this show encourages interaction, there is no pressure to speak on camera. Audience members can just type in the specially designed online platform to influence the course of events!
The show will be followed by approximately 30 mins of informal discussion with the artists and Andro and Eve, and with space for folk to connect and share their thoughts.
TICKET INFO:
£10 + booking fee
or £15 + booking fee for Solidarity Tickets.
Discounted tickets (£5) available for those on low incomes.
CSI Skill Tree: Kentucky Route Zero
On 27th July, as part of a series of online events run by Arizona State University’s Centre for Science and the Imagination, I will be talking about Kentucky Route Zero with Rachel Carr, a scholar of Southern U.S. and Modernist literature, as well as Women’s and Gender Studies, at Lindsey Wilson College in Kentucky. We’ll be talking about gothic motifs of places that carry trauma, figurations of rural and post-industrial landscapes, and the role of play and art in how the game imagines post-capitalist ways of living. Details here!
In the CSI Skill Tree series, we examine and celebrate how video games envision possible futures, build rich and thought-provoking worlds, and engage people as active participants in unfolding and interpreting stories.
For our latest event, we’ll take a close look at Kentucky Route Zero, a magical realist adventure game about a secret, paranormal highway running through the caves beneath Kentucky. The game was released in five “acts” between 2013 and 2020, and it takes a mind-bending artistic and philosophical approach to themes of labor, debt, alienation, rural disinvestment, automation, the collision of the digital and physical worlds, and how history haunts our experience of the present and our possible futures.
Our special guests are Zoyander Street, an artist, researcher, critic, and ethnographer who works on video games, media art, and other (mis)uses of technology, and Rachel Carr, a scholar of Southern U.S. and Modernist literature, as well as Women’s and Gender Studies, at Lindsey Wilson College in Kentucky.
The event will be broadcast live on Zoom, and is free and open to everyone—register today!
Reclaiming the Rainbow Photo Challenge
I am one of three judges on Andro & Eve’s Reclaiming the Rainbow Photo Challenge – details below. Please send in your weirdest visual experiments with rainbows!
Reclaiming the Rainbow Photo Challenge is a way to raise awareness of the Pride flag as a symbol of safety, build connections, and celebrate the strength of the South Yorkshire LGBTQ+ community through this difficult time.
Are you LGBTQ+ and living in South Yorkshire? Then get involved with our photo challenge!
To enter our photo challenge all you need to do is to take a photo on your phone or camera.
Entries close on midnight on Sunday 1st August.
The photo challenge entries will be judged by South Yorkshire creatives, Nelly Naylor, Yuen Fong Ling, and Zoyander Street.
The winner will receive a bumper pack of goodies from local independents including Vulgar Vintage, Showroom Cinema, Birdhouse Tea, Beer Central, Truffle Pig Vegan and Artisan and Eco. There’ll also be prizes for runners up too from Moss and Clover florists and treats by Elly Joy.
Winners announced in early August. Have fun and good luck!
Joining NEoN’s trustees
I recently had the joy of becoming one of 8 new trustees of digital arts festival North East of North (NEoN). At a time when arts and culture organisations are under extraordinary pressure, I’m excited to play even a small role in this fantastic organisation’s work supporting and showcasing digital art, elevating marginalised voices, and exploring new ways to serve audiences that are often excluded from art spaces. Learn more about NEoN and the other trustees at the link below!
Raju Rage with the Right Lube: Desperate Living
Cis Penance is currently on display online at Studio Voltaire, as part of artist Raju Rage’s research project with trans writing project The Right Lube. They are doing work around trans self-medding and bodily autonomy, under the following statement:
“We stand for self-agency in determining our own heath requirements and gender definitions and not having to rely on a medical system that is often a barrier for trans people for multiple reasons, such as not meeting requirements and fitting definitions that are cis gender determined, not having access to services, gatekeeping and waiting on a national health service that has been cut, wanting autonomy from medical recognition, plus more.”
https://www.studiovoltaire.org/whats-on/raju-rage-with-the-right-lube-online-research-desperate-living/
The Studio Voltaire page for the Desperate Living programme shows Raju Rage’s 2017 video collage Pyramid Revealed By A Sandstorm, an immersive, layered, textured piece of video art meditating on hormones as a kind of meeting point between the body and big sociotechnical structures.
If you are a trans or non-binary person considering self-medding, harm reduction workshops are available as part of the Desperate Living programme, which you can learn more about by following @raju_rage on Instagram.
Ludonarracon panel April 23rd
Update 26 April: you can now watch this panel here!
I’m very excited to be on a panel at Ludonarracon next week about narrative structure and placemaking in games. Ludonarracon is a digital festival of indie videogame storytelling that I often referred to last year when looking for interesting and inspiring things to play and new ways of thinking about the medium, and you should definitely check it out if you are interested in stories or interactive media.
Friday April 23, 3pm PT
Stories are Structures, Videogames are Places
Claris Cyarron, Zoyander Street, Nathalie Lawhead, Jord Farrell
Videogames give us places to experience and explore. Stories offer us escape and example. The advantages and appeal of spending time in the many worlds or stories on offer through videogames has never been more clear, but the spaces where we spend our time shape us, even as they are shaped by us. Videogames are more than portals to other situations; they are places. At least, that is (part of) how these artists see them. Join videogame developers Nathalie Lawhead, Jord Farrell, Zoyander Street, and Claris Cyarron as they discuss the structural, material, and experiential aspects of their artforms.
Collaboration with Squinky as part of “New Conversations”
I’m delighted to announce that I’m starting a project in collaboration with Dietrich “Squinky” Squinkifer, as part of “New Conversations”, a programme funded and delivered by the British Council, Canada Council for the Arts, Farnham Maltings, and the High Commission of Canada in the UK. I’m excited to be part of a cohort of participants thinking about critical issues such as disability, land, gender, and racial justice.
Squinky is one of my favourite artists, and also someone I feel incredibly lucky to be able to call a friend. If you’re not familiar with their work, it’s difficult to know where to start, but we first connected when I was crowdfunding for Dreamcast Worlds, and they were crowdfunding for Dominique Pomplemoose, a stop-motion animated musical adventure game with a non-binary person of colour protagonist – all of this was a significant breath of fresh air in 2012. They were kind enough to agree to a bit of mutual cross-promotion, so some Dom Pam backers supported Dreamcast Worlds and vice versa. We’ve been friends since then, attending games events together and occasionally collaborating on organising or curating things for indie and queer games.
Among the many projects they’ve made over the past nine years, two in particular have had a major impact on me. One is you used to be someone – if you’ve seen me give a presentation about queer games, you already know that I’m deeply fascinated by this game’s portrayal of affect, temporality, urban space, and identity. The other is Coffee: A Misunderstanding, an interactive play that was performed in real-life settings, including on stage, in tents at festivals, and in actual real-life coffee shops. It was facilitated by network-connected mobile phones that allow two people to perform as “puppets” by performing a script shown on their phones, and two others to control their actions and dialogue by selecting options, video-game style, from two other phones. Seven years later, I still think and talk about this play pretty frequently, particularly when considering what the structuring of dialogue choices is doing to a story: one of Squinky’s remarkable insights that comes through in Coffee is how the awkwardness of digital interfaces can be integrated into the tone and pacing of their writing. The project we’re creating together on the New Conversations programme will draw heavily on Coffee: A Misunderstanding, but we’re writing new content that reflects our personal and collective experiences understanding gender and neurodiversity, and designing a digital staging environment that messes with the awkwardness of video calls.
One of my tentative hopes for this project is to learn something about how artists can mess with video calling to create environments that actually suit the creative outputs that they want to achieve. When artists run workshops in physical space, they often think carefully about how the space is going to be set up and used, perhaps bringing with them a lot of tools and materials required to inspire people and get them in the right frame of mind. When running activities on something like Zoom, you have very little ability to exert similar control over the space. I’ve used a few other platforms over the past year that have been very effective at getting people creative in some ways: itch.io is great for inspiring people to make things and giving them a place to share them together, PubPub is a lovely way for strangers to make written publications together in a relatively ad-hoc manner, and Discord has been a great way to host a video call within an environment where longer-term asynchronous conversations are also going on. But even when bringing one of these into play, you still have almost no ability to directly author the environment you’re working within, modify it, and use its aesthetic qualities in an intentional manner.
As always, I feel like what’s needed is an open-source, community-owned option that allows us to be autonomous and experimental, even if that means tolerating glitches and unexpected outcomes. The goal of this project isn’t to create a video calling platform for general use, but I’m looking forward to learning about what interventions into video calling are possible on a low budget and at a small scale.
Zoyander Street 