relationships – Digital Arts and New Media MFA Exhibition

Evie Chang

Buddytale

Buddytale is a game exploring our attachments to virtual pets and the nature of our relationships to them. The game invites players pick out and care for their own virtual buddy and play through snapshots of their life together: their first meeting, picking out a toy at the pet shop, comforting them during a particularly bad storm, and so on, until they must say goodbye.

Evie Chang is an interdisciplinary multimedia artist who aims to make interesting, evocative, and beautiful work out of anything (physical or otherwise) she can bend to her will.

Click here to play Buddytale

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Colleen Jennings

Virtual Apparitions, Digital Ghosts, Manifested Networks

Virtual Apparitions explores the transfer of identity through networks by examining the physical manifestation of virtual bodies using platforms that support congenial, friendly, romantic, or intimate relationships over long distances. Virtual bodies, including avatars, social media profiles, or video platforms, do not relay intimacy or subtle social cues; however, as technology advances, the gaps between the corporeal and virtual continue to diminish. The work visualizes the extended social network as a physical presence through the use of video, sound, and sculpture. In the cacophony of voices, presence is indeterminable, focus is scattered, and the network pulses with artificial liveliness.

Colleen Jennings is a multidisciplinary artist whose work focuses on emerging relationships between technology and visual culture. Virtual Apparitions is the culmination of the artist’s growing interaction with social media platforms that enable and encourage long distance relationships through visual manifestations of virtual bodies.

SL Benz

Auratic Interpreter

The desire for a holistic interpreter, or to be an objective empath, is a desire to move beyond ironic detachment, habitual consumerism, scientific reductionism and religious naivety. It reflects a desire for grounding the being phenomenologically, with one’s possessions as part of the politics of self. Benz’ installation is an attempt at mediating invisible knowledge, however anecdotal or trivial, revealing the multiplicities of possible narrative. Part divination, part polygraph technology, this machine reads the aura of inanimate objects and translates it to a visual record. This piece anticipates the need for increased data/memory retrieval in a post-material future.

SL Benz is an animation artist and experimental filmmaker working in hybrid media forms.Their work explores the interplay of memory, mediation, and political theology. By re-engaging with the supernatural and the ghosts of material forms, Benz’ work examines our relationships with culture.

https://vimeo.com/slbenz

Marcelo Viana Neto

Radical Play

Game design is traditionally practiced and taught within pyramidal, top-down hierarchies. While they can efficiently produce market-ready products (and workers), they result in the empowerment of select individuals at the top of the hierarchy while wasting the creative potential of the majority. Radical Play demonstrates the development and application of a game design curriculum that embodies principles of critical pedagogy and direct democracy, in which all individuals are empowered to manage their own work and personal development, while also being directly involved in the overall direction of the practice. In doing so, it seeks to challenge designers and educators to stop replicating, within our own practices, the injustices we so openly condemn.

Marcelo Viana Neto is a multi-disciplinary artist and educator interested in how games can help explore socio-economic relations based on solidarity and mutual aid, reveal illegitimate forms of power, and enable creative expression. He was born in Sete Lagoas, Brazil and has been a resident of California since 2002. He holds a BFA in Graphic Design with high distinction from the California College of the Arts and is currently an MFA candidate in DANM at UC Santa Cruz. His current research focuses on applying non-hierarchical participatory modes of organization to game design pedagogy and practice.

Sarah Fay Krom

Verge

Verge explores the transformation of visual language in a computer-mediated storyworld. The visual storytelling frame teems with dramatic meaning, compressing physical, psychological, and interpersonal relationships into one. Through the computational processes at the heart of an interactive storyworld, the communicative role of visual language is fundamentally altered. The player now converses with the fictional world through the visual imagery of the screen, recasting the traditional cinematic view as a playable space. In [Verge], visual language presents itself as an evocative conversation, making its expressive possibilities a tangible, dramatically meaningful interface between the player and the storyworld.

Sarah Fay Krom is an artist, designer, and educator. Her work explores visually expressive interactive storyworlds and the underlying computational processes that expand and enrich their artistic palette. A graduate of Carnegie Mellon University, she is currently pursuing her MFA in the Digital Arts and New Media program at UC Santa Cruz. She has taught at Armstrong Institute for Interactive Media, Miami University, OH; National University of Singapore; Fachhochschule Kiel in Germany; and DeAnza College in CA. She has developed curriculum at Peking University in Beijing, and was the Founding Director of the GameLab at Nanyang Technological University in Singapore. Visit Sarah Fay’s website at http://sarahfaykrom.com

Sean Pace

C.R.A.W.L.E.R.

C.R.A.W.L.E.R., the Community Roving Artists Workshop Lab for Educational Research

The C.R.A.W.L.E.R is a platform for arts outreach, social justice, and field research. The motivation for this project involves the social integration of art as a practice for preserving human creativity and fostering its growth. Relationships forged through creative behavior expand the impact of the artist’s practice from the “artist to audience” into an “artist to artist” co-creating relationship. The co-generative space is a uniquely inviting experience where the formal boundaries between art and observer are disrupted, manifesting a unique experience validating the art.

Sean Pace is an artist from Asheville, North Carolina with a background in kinetic sculpture and social activism. His interests have been in energy, social and cultural development, and personal exploration of mechanics with reappropriated found objects, often obscuring meaning with charged metaphors and playful forms of hearsay. He co-founded the Flood Fine Art Center in Asheville, NC and he started Blue Ridge Bio-Fuels in Asheville as well. At UC Santa Cruz he has worked to generate a social intervention practice that brings a mobile workshop into the public arena to create access to some of the newest technologies for sculptural fabrication and object exploration.