SCREEN\DOOR

visual studies workshop
December 9, 2021

SCREEN/DOOR featured several members and friends of the swampbabes community across the earth working in various genres and mediums, with a common interest in radical (video) game making, playing, and exhibiting. These works deal with the video screen as door, wall, and window, many with a conflicted sense of dread or longing. Includes games, video, and performance from Cody Filardi, gg noni, Mariken and fotocopiadora, Evan Bobrow, Peter Basma-Lord, nilson carroll, Taehee Whang, and others. SCREEN\DOOR was an in-person screening in the VSW Microcinema as well as VSW's first live-streamed screening event via Twitch. Download the program here.



Queer Games Bundle 2021

itch.io
June 2021

The Queer Games Bundle is an initiative to collaboratively support as many queer micro/art game devs and makers as possible. The 2021 bundle included over 230 games made by almost 200 artists and allowed them to sell their games collectively and without competition during June, Pride Month. The lofty goal was to raise $5.8 million dollars, one-third of the cost to make a AAA video game, to give all artists involved a livable wage for a year. The 2021 bundle raised over 120,000 USD, earning every queer artist over 700 USD. The Queer Games Bundle is a reaction to many things, labor in the time of the Covid-19 pandemic, the ultra competitive indie games community, and the increasing stranglehold of rainbow capitalism over queer identities. This project was led by Taylor McCue and nilson carroll and hosted on itch.io.



[Games For Windows]

rochester, ny
Fall 2019

Games for Windows: Experiments with Game Footage was a store-front window exhibition at The Liquor Store in Rochester, NY. Expanding the tradition of cinema and games, each artist uses various gestures of play to create experimental video art from video game footage. These videos work through issues of sexism in popular culture, gun-related violence, modes of queering, mainstream ludic binaries, and intimacy in games by taking radical approaches to the formal qualities of video games. Relieved of their performative, neo-liberal gameplay hierarchies, the game footage and graphics in these videos are imbued with new meanings, difficult questions, and unfamiliar aesthetics. By presenting these works together in an ongoing public viewing space, images and actions familiar to game players constantly shift and create new dialogues between the monitors as well as between games culture, the art community, and the pedestrians of Rochester.