blood play: A Queer Gothic Approach to Game Design and Grey University
blood play is a queer gothic installation that consists of posters with QR codes that link to game fragments and printed zines containing narrative and theory.
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Media
Installation, printed documents, digital games, posters with QR codes
Games are unique among media because they allow for—in fact, they almost always depend upon—user interaction. there is potential for games to capitalize on this aspect of their form: by using procedural rhetoric, designers can use games present nuanced theses supported by a designed experience.
Queerness is, fundamentally, radical and disruptive. it poses a threat to the heteronormative systems that we find ourselves stuck within because queerness opposes the idea of heterosexual futurity—queerness rejects the notion of the straight family unit and heterosexual generational logic.
As a queer gothic game designer therefore, i am interested in designing games and systems that challenge normative assumptions both about games and about gothic media. the work i am presenting sets an example for how we as queer game designers can engage with queer, gothic, and monster theory while working within the queer gothic genre—which i identify as a radical genre that relies on gothic structures to usurp the status quo.
With blood play and grey university, i blend theory and practice with my project and produce three sets of artifacts: a printed treatise on the poetics of the queer gothic genre. paired with a piece of serialized queer gothic fiction; fragments of a queer gothic game built mostly in twine; and a printed post mortem that critically analyzes my process and my art, evaluating its success.
dani wright
Biography
dani (she/they) is a queer game designer and digital artist working on 2d digital art, graphic design, web design, and systems design. she has studied computer science and game design for the past decade. these overlapping skill sets place her practice at the intersection of computational media and new media art. most of her work is focused on interactive fiction, but she has also worked on multiple tabletop games as well as some 2d platformer games and experimental 3d games. their recent work, including their MFA thesis, has been focused on the queer gothic genre—specifically interrogating the vampire as a queer gothic figure. she holds an BA in Art and Design: Games and Playable Media and is currently pursuing an MFA in Digital Art and New Media: Experimental Play, both at UC Santa Cruz.
Dave Crellin
Troubled Waters: The Ocean as Contested Space in California Surf Culture
A site-specific installation exploring the history of white supremacy, racialized exclusion, and erasure in the formation of the so-called “California Dream” in surf and beach popular culture throughout Pacific Coast leisure spaces.
Media
Site-specific, locative QR codes, archival media, audio narratives, interactive website
“Troubled Waters: The Ocean as Contested Space in California Surf Culture,” is a site-specific intervention exploring the history of white supremacy, racialized exclusion, and erasure in the formation of the so-called “California Dream” in surf and beach popular culture throughout Pacific Coast leisure spaces. There are several levels to the project- an ongoing, multimedia installation taking place at surf sites along the California coast; activism within surf marketing and consumer culture to foster greater diversity and representation; audio recordings highlighting first-person narratives from surfers of color relating their experiences, and a website to engage, challenge, educate, and importantly, encourage opportunities to lend support and signal-boost organizations that are painting a new portrait of surf culture, pushing back against narratives that have typically been presented.
Troubled Waters: The Ocean as Contested Space in California Surf Culture is an intervention, an accountability, and a call-to-action. A series of surf stickers, mimicking those that exist throughout surf culture, have been placed in well-established surfing locales along the California Coast, from Santa Cruz to San Diego. The QR codes embedded in the stickers lead viewers to contemporary and historical archival material that illustrate the undercurrents of racism and hegemony throughout surfing’s colonial history, problematizing the rendering of surf and beach culture as an egalitarian realm, open to all. At selected surf spots on the coast, I engage in conversation with surfers and other beachgoers, recording their reactions and comments as further documentation. I have also contacted local businesses that profit from surf marketing and culture to create pathways that foster greater diversity and representation in their visual advertising landscape, and the “histories” they present to that end.
The accompanying website provides access to further viewing and reading that engages the history of surfing through a critical lens, in both scholarship and popular culture, audio recordings from surfers of color relating their lived experience with surfing and racism, links to websites and organizations of color that are reclaiming the ocean and beaches on their terms, inscribing a contemporary chronicle that imagines an oceanic ecosystem of diversity, equity, inclusion, and encourages opportunities to lend material support to these organizations.
I was raised in Southern California and spent almost all my time at the ocean. As a white person, I grew up ingesting a false narrative about the history and culture of surfing and beach life. A story that normalized and foregrounded white experience, while erasing the participation and historical precedent of people of color in creating, defining, and shaping the sport of surfing. This project was borne out of a sense of anger and shame to have been part of a racialized culture that created and allowed such intolerance and divisiveness to exist, all the while espousing values purported to lie at the heart of surfing- equality, community, inclusion, and respect. I came to the realization that to honor the generative lessons that I believe the ocean and surfing offers, we must be willing to look deeply and critically at the whitewashing of surf culture, its participation in perpetuating racism, and the lack of representation and inclusion that persists in surfing, in all its aspect, to this day.
Otherwise, the echoes of racism and exclusion will continue to lie beneath the surface of the waves, as a form of oceanic pollution, hauntological detritus, coastal decimation, and climate disaster. My hope is that this project instantiates a reckoning and reevaluation in white surf culture, brings greater awareness to surfers of color, scholars, activists, and creatives working to change surf culture, and opens further space to reimagine the beach and ocean as places of equity, inclusion, diversity, and community.
Dave Crellin
Biography
Dave Crellin, MA., is an artist, scholar, and educator. He has been working professionally for over 25 years throughout most of North America and Western Europe, his practice ranging from collaboration with theatre makers, filmmakers, musicians, dancers, circus and cabaret performers to authors, scholars, community leaders and creatives of all ages. He was the co-founder and a principal performer in the critically acclaimed underground performance troupe, Circus Contraption. His research and creative areas of interest include social justice, gender, race, and constructs of power, immersive, devised, documentary and site-specific performance, circus and cabaret, rhizomatic pedagogy, Deleuzian studies and art as social practice in and for The Commons. Dave holds a MA. in Theatre, will complete his MFA in DANM Future Stages in June 2022. Current projects include an installation and website engaging issues of racism, diversity and inclusion in surf culture, and a manifesto of sustainable, intersectional methodologies and practices for creating original, live performance.
Laura Boutros
Amduat: The Twelve Hours of Ra explores the Egyptian-American diaspora through a museum’s journey into the Ancient Egyptian underworld.
Media
Multi-Media Performance
When conceiving my MFA production I knew I wanted to explore my identity; what does it mean to be stripped of all the context of your history and grow up “creating” a relationship with your ancestry across the globe? What results is a fragmented and layered group of choices that must literally be unwrapped throughout one’s life. This trajectory highlighted the areas I have witnessed Egyptians depicted in Western media and performance, or rather the neglect of such appearances and the inclination towards appropriation and white-washing. My work attempts to restitute Egyptian aesthetics in the West, and recraft these narratives through an informed lens.
Amduat: The Twelve Hours of Ra is an immersive multi-media theater experience that centers on the Egyptian-American diaspora. Drawing on themes of circularity and liminality, the work situates Egyptian aesthetics in the Western museum space and draws on the Ancient Egyptian myth of Ra’s twelve-hour journey in the Duat. The audience is taken on a “docent” tour by major figures in Egypt’s Pharaonic age, encountering mythological counterparts, and experiencing the duality of order and chaos.
The word “amduat” translates to “Text of the Hidden Chamber Which is the Underworld” which describes the land of the dead, its’ spirits, guardians, and threats. Amduat draws on interpretations of this text, along with historical events, to create a narrative that captures Ra’s death and rebirth and the lifetime of conflict in a first-generation American-Egyptian. The piece questions the legacies of colonialism in narratives and history while highlighting the media’s role in perpetuating misinformation surrounding Egypt’s stories.
Death, in the piece, is examined through the lens of “the mummy,” questioning the treatment this monster has faced on the Western screen, and what it means to have a soul or consciousness, despite being dead. Beyond media, mummies are most often found in museums, the setting of Amduat. Brought before the Rosetta Stone, the Arab Spring, and a number of other Egyptian “encounters” with the West, the audience is called to not only judge characters on the scales of Ma’at, but themselves as they are brought before the results of colonialism by wrapping and unwrapping the past.
Laura Boutros
Biography
Laura Boutros is an Egyptian-American film and theater maker pursuing an MFA in Digital Arts and New Media at UC Santa Cruz. Her practice focuses on personal catharsis, Egyptian diaspora, and liminality by stitching together media, current events, and historical precedent to capture contradictory pathos. She worked as a Video Production intern for Euphoric Styles and the Santa Cruz Music Festival for two years honing her take on a curated artistic experiences. Her time working in media marketing has made her interested in audience reception theory and the role humor plays in audience community formation. These topics appear in her latest piece Macbeth: I Want it Frat Way, a satirical staged take on Reality Television through the lens of a college Fraternity directed in UC Santa Cruz. In the past, she has worked with Director Kirsten Brandt on the third iteration of The Frankenstein Project, which explored monsterhood, fragmentation, and layered media also in UC Santa Cruz. For her senior thesis film, Enlightened, she combined this layering and fragmentation to explore the fictional relationship between a wronged Pharaoh and her descendant, a key theme that carries through to her MFA thesis. She hopes to expands more on these topics in her MFA production Amduat: The Twelve Hours of Ra.
Media
Multi-Media Performance
Forest Reid
The Last Galician Switchboard
The Last Galician Switchboard is an interactive video installation, that lyrically composites archival footage with Yiddish folklore, literature, and music.
Media
The Last Galician Switchboard is an interactive multi-screen video installation that follows a switchboard operator haunted by family left behind in Eastern Europe. The piece incorporates familial letters and excerpts from Yiddish theatre, literature, and folklore. The work continues the lineage of the authors, playwrights, and poets of a once vibrant “Yiddishland” that were exploring their own struggles with spirituality, assimilation, and ancestral haunting.
The Last Galician Switchboard uses switchboards to patch the dead into the living, to answer unanswered letters of desperation, and to connect the present with the past that haunts it. Haunting is a theme that permeates many popular pieces of Jewish media from the classic case of spiritual possession seen in Ansky’s The Dybbuk to Tevye’s nightmare sequence in Fiddler on the Roof, where his ancestors communicate with him from beyond the grave. Though prevalent, haunting is not a uniquely Jewish phenomenon, in the essay “Before Dispossession, or Surviving It,” the Super Futures Haunt Qollective presents haunting as a response by dispossessed people. They define dispossession not only as the act of being forced from one’s lands but “how human lives and bodies matter and don’t matter—through settler colonialism, chattel slavery, apartheid, making (bodies) extra legal, immoral,(and) alienated.”
The Last Galician Switchboard is set in a small town outside of Detroit in the 1930s. The main character Sore, is a Jewish immigrant from Eastern Europe who has recently started working as a switchboard operator. Her evening starts off normal with calls from lovers in turmoil and with a call from an older family friend who recounts the Yiddish folktale of a cantor possessed by a dybbuk. The night takes a turn when a fireman from Detroit calls in to tell Sore that a fire is approaching her town and she has to call the lines and tell people to gather their valuables and evacuate. At this point the production becomes interactive and the is able to choose where to patch into. As they begin patching into various lines, it will become clear they are no longer in a small-town in Michigan but rather patched into the other side.
The inspiration for this production initially came from a set of familial letters from Eastern Europe from 1915 to 1920 that I came across last year. The letters depict my relatives’ personal anguish and pleas for help as the continent is ravaged by war, famine, and disease and my family is forced to continually migrate and wander. My great aunt Marcia had collected and translated the letters for a family newsletter she made in the 90s (The Indianer Mishpokhe). The letters are primarily in Yiddish, though due to some restrictions they are later forced to be in Polish. It is unclear from the letters whether my family in America had been unable to respond/send money or if their letters had just never reached my family in Europe.The time and place that my family’s letters are from inspired many Yiddish works. It is documented thoroughly in S. Ansky’s ethnographic work and diaries including The Destruction of Galicia and is the direct inspiration for Sholem Asch’s play דער טויטער מענטש (The Dead Man).
James Forest Reid
Biography
James Forest Reid is a Bay Area based sound designer, composer, and installation artist. His audio-visual work engages with Jewish Mysticism, Yiddish culture, and repurposed archives. He has diverse experience with sound including archival preservation, data sonification, and studio engineering. His engineering work has been featured on the best of Bandcamp. He has worked with the La Jolla Playhouse and the Scripps Institution of Oceanography and has had work featured in San Diego’s Without Walls (WOW) festival and on KSQD radio. He has a B.A. from the University of California, San Diego in Interdisciplinary Computing and the Arts and is pursuing an MFA in Digital Arts and New Media from the University of California, Santa Cruz.
Mohamadreza Babaee
Global (re)Entry simulates and redesigns Customs and Border Protection agency’s “Global (re)Entry” software as a pro-immigrant 2D video game and installation. Continue Reading Mohamadreza Babaee
Global (re)Entry
MOHAMADREZA BABAEE
Global (re)Entry simulates and redesigns Customs and Border Protection agency’s “Global (re)Entry” software as a pro-immigrant 2D video game and installation.
Collaborators
Maddy Grass Doss: Composer and sound artist
Fion Kwok: 2D and UI artist
Avery Weibel: Unity programmer
Media
Video game
Video and sound installation
Global (re)Entry is a new addition to my “Border Crossing” art series, a collection of performance and interactive projects about the complex connection between migration, surveillance, and identity. In this series, I ask: How do immigrants use art to establish their identities in the US? How are such identity construction efforts obstructed by state surveillance policies? How do immigrants creatively respond to xenophobic, colonial, racist, sexist, and queerphobic security practices? My art, scholarship, and pedagogy function in tandem to address such questions and intervene in oppressive systems of state surveillance. Driven by a fierce passion for social justice, I design art projects that go beyond issues of representation and, instead, make room for practical and utopian imagination of a better future, particularly for immigrants of color.
Global (re)Entry is a critical and parodic take on the Global Entry program designed by the US Customs and Border Protection agency. Similar to other Trusted Traveler programs, Global Entry allows “low-risk” US citizens and permanent residents to use an automated machine to receive their clearance for crossing international borders. The conditions through which Global Entry considers a traveler as low risk are not disclosed publicly and are open to interpretation and bias.
My project, designed as a 2D game, borrows textual and visual assets from the US Department of Homeland Security (and the associated agencies) website to simulate and repurpose the traveler screening program. In the game, players need to answer some questions to receive their travel clearance cards. However, their resistance to participating in state-sponsored security theatres can reward them in “cosmic” ways. While players can use the game to learn more about unfair border control strategies and oppressive state policies targeting immigrants, they can also fictionally redesign discriminatory US immigration forms and generate pro-immigrant, antiracist manifestos.
This project aims to intervene in the failing current US immigration system. The game encourages a closer look at systems through which social, political, and civic ostracization of immigrants is perpetuated. Moreover, the project invites players to formulate an ideal vision of society based in equality, fairness, and inclusion. Global (re)Entry takes on a critical examination of state-wide surveillance and prejudice and asks players to reflect on how their personal choices can intentionally and inadvertently influence the border-crossing practices of immigrants locally and globally.
Mohamadreza Babaee
Biography
Mohamadreza Babaee is an Iranian performance and digital media studies scholar and transdisciplinary artist. His research and creative areas of interest include Migration, Surveillance, Critical Race Theory, Transnational Feminism, Iran, and the broader Middle East. He frequently presents at theatre and performance studies conferences and contributes articles and book reviews to academic journals, including Journal of Dramatic Theory and Criticism and Theatre Topics. His art practice ranges from collaborating with professional Middle Eastern American theatre companies such as Silk Road Rising (Chicago, IL) to producing digital and board games that examine identity politics in diasporic contexts. Mohamadreza holds a Ph.D. in Theatre from Bowling Green State University and is currently an MFA candidate in Digital Arts and New Media at the University of California, Santa Cruz.
Media
Video game
Video and sound installation