Interview in Our Favourite Places

Our Favourite Places is a site that reviews cultural stuff in Sheffield, and is an incredibly helpful resource that comprehensively covers all kinds of venues, events, and local businesses. This week they have published a lovely little profile of my work:

https://ourfaveplaces.co.uk/meet-the-locals/zoyander-street/

Speaking of interviews, but going in the other direction, where I’m the one asking questions: I’m keen to get more trans interviewees lined up for the next two weeks at Site Gallery. Give me a shout if you’re interested: zoyander@gmail.com

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Site Gallery platform exhibition

Having returned from a fascinating and disorienting residency in Belfast (I’m still looking for interviewees from Belfast by the way) I’m now back in my own studio preparing work for the forthcoming work in progress show at Site Gallery this August. I’m going to show the interactive portrait cushions as well as some newer work that is still taking shape – a big part of my aim for the show is to start conducting interviews with transgender people in Sheffield, so please get in touch if that aspect interests you. The other Freelands artists are also preparing brilliant work that I’m super excited about, and we’ll be sharing an activity space for improvisation, exchange, and play. See some details here.

Platform 2019 highlights the work of the first five artists on our Freelands Artists Programme – a rolling five-year initiative supporting two-year paid residencies for emerging artists in the Sheffield City Region.

08 Aug 2019 – 01 Sep 2019
Main Gallery

Artists exhibiting at Site Gallery: Lucy Vann, Siân Williams and Zoyander Street.

Alison J Carr will be showing at Bloc Projects and Yuen Fong Ling at Yorkshire Artspace, Persistence Works.

Our Platform artists will be delivering family-friendly workshops over August based on their work. Children and their families will have the opportunity to explore the artists’ creative process and make their own artwork in response.

The second year of the programme opens to applications on Monday 3 June.

Our partners on the Freelands Artist Programme are Bloc Projects, Museums Sheffield, S1 Artspace, and Yorkshire Artspace.

Mid docfest update

Docfest is about halfway done,
and it’s been so lovely so far.
The Interactive Portrait Cushions
are hung right of the entrance to
the exhibition space, and I’ve had
great conversations with people about the unique pleasures and challenges of handmade computers.

I just finished a panel discussion with IP Yuk Yiu about his piece, to Call a Horse a Deer, comparing our approaches to simple interface design for conceptually complex works.

On Tuesday I will be on a
panel with Georgie Pinn in the
context of a series of discussions
about ecological and environmental
issues. I’m very excited that this
provides the opportunity to talk
about how computer media and
empathy discourse relate to bigger
global issues such as resource extraction, and waste flows to the global south.

View this post on Instagram

This piece is titled “Interactive Portraits: trans people in Japan” inside each pocket is a games console. By @zoyander “A playful representation of transgender people from Japan, this cybertwee experience uses the nostalgic style of early gaming to create a connection with its contributors” #docfest #trans #game

A post shared by Arts Council England (@aceagrams) on Jun 7, 2019 at 5:17am PDT

Critaoke

I’m going to embarrass myself this Saturday by performing a Karaoke version of Sara Ahmed’s “Feminist Killjoys” to the tune of Chiquitita (I haven’t called it Critiquita, but gosh that seems like a missed opportunity now). Details below.

Description

Join us as we mark the closing of Re-collections with Crit-a-Oke – a free cabaret event featuring live performances, projections and karaoke.

Crit-a-Oke feels like a late night party lecture. Squashing art criticism, theory and academic texts into a karaoke blender and sipping on the thinky musical smoothie that drips from the other side.

Think Donna Summer and the S.C.U.M. Manifesto.

Ask, “Does your Mother Know” about John Berger?

Get thoughtful and dancey all at once as Sheffield’s artists and thinkers perform their favourite arty texts as you’ve never heard them, to the songs that you (probably) know.

Specially created visuals projected during the performances will reference Site’s lifespan from 1979 to the present, with contributions from Society of Explorers.

Performing on the night:

• Tsarzi
• Sarah Christie
• Matthew Cull
• Oriana Franceschi
• Caitlin Merrett King & Josef Shanley Jackson
• Miriam Miller
• Zoyander Street
• Lucy Vann

Kollective Coffee and Kitchen will be open late serving refreshments.

Crit-a-Oke is brought to you by Tžužjj – a curatorial project between Louis Palliser-Ames and James Harper.

Links

Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/events/598394327325506/

Eventbrite: https://www.eventbrite.co.uk/e/crit-a-oke-closing-party-tickets-60570695581

Interactive portraits at Doc/Fest

Interactive Portraits has been selected for the Sheffield Doc/Fest Alternate Realities exhibition at the Site Gallery! Check out the other pieces in the show here: https://sheffdocfest.com/films/interactive

Mine isn’t the only piece portraying LGBT issues. My Mother’s Kitchen by Maeve Marsde and Tea Uglow is an interactive documentary based on interviews with eight LGBTQI+ people, that takes shape around domestic spaces. Through the Wardrobe by Rob Eagle is an augmented reality installation centering on clothes and gender expression. Another Dream by Tamara Shogaolu is a Virtual Reality piece about a lesbian couple from Egypt who have to figure out what to do in the wake of post-revolution attacks on the community.

I’m excited to see To Call a Horse a Deer in the nominations for Best Digital Experience – I played it at AMAZE and found it very distressing and compelling. It’s not AR, VR, MR, or whatever, it’s just a lo-fi text-based game that gets into your head and alters reality for a little while. It sort of hypnotised me into a conceptual sensation I haven’t felt before, except perhaps when I was catatonic with depression – though the content isn’t actually depressing or overwrought in any way. Putting that weird sensation in the context of a representation of state oppression is fascinating – I always associate fascism with the stirring up of popular passions, but this is portraying something else, a kind of enforced dissociation.

Video: Collecting games at UC Irvine

This is a short documentary that I made a while ago but never published, about a collection of videogames that has come to be used to teach students at UC Irvine.

Back in 2017, I recorded a load of footage for a series of short documentaries about people who curate and archive games. I have a page for the whole series here.

Some stuff got published on sites that briefly had a budget for freelance video, but there were multiple issues that led to the series never finishing. Three of them were hosted by a website that technically isn’t really running anymore, and I don’t know what the future fate of their Youtube channel might be, so I’ve been uploading them to Vimeo.

The one I uploaded today never got published before – with this done, I have one more left to finish before this particular unfinished project is finally tidied away!

Now Play This 2019

Interactive Portraits: Trans People in Japan is going to Now Play This festival at Somerset House in London this April! It’s going to be shown alongside work by absolutely incredible artists including Brenda Romero, Tale of Tales, Harry Josephine Giles, and Sokpop Collective – an overwhelming thing to contemplate, so I’m trying not to think about it.

Check out the website to see the whole list of beautiful artgames and book tickets.