Co-curated with Heather Kelley, RULES FOR AN OTHER SELF was an exhibition & experimental arcade featuring female-identified artists whose work hack, modify, or misuse various game platforms (online, retro, lrp) to explore and disassemble standard frameworks of performance, gender, and power.
✦ ANGELA WASHKO (Pgh)
“Free Will Mode” watch the world of The Sims rapidly break down in a series of real-time videos revealing the artificial idiocy & cultural biases built into the overall game design. Angela is an artist who creates new forums for discussion of feminism in spaces most hostile toward it. Visiting Professor at CMU.
✦ DARYL KAMEN (Montreal/Paris)
"A Gathering of Flowers" 3 special accounts will be created for visitors who want to play in real-time. Daryl will create a happening inside the game, where pixel pollen born from user-created flowers creates hallucinations, dreams, prophecies – converging in the coronation of a Pollen Queen. Daryl is an award-winning writer, cartoonist, game designer & creator of Kwaan (a tiny poetic MMOrpg still in Early Access) with a very strong & creative community.
✦ SOHA KAREEM (Palestine/Toronto/SF)
"reProgram" is an interactive fiction about a woman with post-traumatic stress disorder trying to find helpful coping mechanisms, and discovering an unexpected relief through a BDSM relationship. Soha is a writer & artist interested in experimental game design, glitch photography, interactive exhibitions, and former Co-Director of Dames Making Games.
✦ HANNAH EPSTEIN (Toronto/Pgh)
"Cock Fight" is a VHS game for 2-4 players. Scores are kept on score sheets. Hannah is a folk media artist working at the cross-section of experimental games & video art. She combines pop-culture imagery with bottom-up story telling techniques, to re-imagine popular discourse. Current MFA student at CMU.
✦ ISLA HANSEN (Nyc)
"The Last Game Ever" is a collaboration between the artist and a sports team in the form of a pick-up game. Isla creates absurd systems to reinterpret & complicate the relationship between the human body & technological progress.
✦ DADPRANKS (www)
Create your own ‘dadprank’ in Secondlife using arbitrary objects that The Dads have collected in their Secondlife artist studio. This all-female collective makes use of evolving retail aesthetics in conjunction with mass produced objects to explore the relationship between consumer and technology on & offline.
✦ MELODY LEE (Pgh)
"indelible" is a game consisting of three vignettes centered around the experience of an unexpected period. Forcing the player to confront awkward situations, it brings to light common scenarios that are not usually spoken of, and hopes to open up a platform for women to talk about their experiences to both men and women alike. Melody Lee is a game designer interested in seeing how game mechanics, accompanied by minimal art and sound, can create emotional experiences. She is part of the team Emotionshop, whose members create individual games every week focusing on a common emotion. Melody believes that games can and should rouse people from their sleepy everydays, just like any other art form, instead of rehashing the same tired interactions. She is currently a Masters of Entertainment Technology candidate at CMU.
