+ CURATED BY BRACY APPEIKUMOH
+ FACILITATED BY DROQEN
July 18, 2024 | 12 – 7 PM
InterAccess Gallery (950 Dupont St., Toronto ON M6H 1Z2)
Reception: 7 – 9 PM
Our five gamemakers in residence have been hard at work making games exploring how technology has enriched/hindered pursuits for sexual intimacy and self-understanding; come join us in celebration, and play some games!
Sex, sexuality, and intimacy are difficult topics also because they are social – we come into our sexual selfhood in relation to one another and each person is their own universe with stars and planets and needs and desires. Social interactions, by their very nature, can be difficult to navigate because of the many variables when interacting with another person. Now, taking all this into consideration, how has technology created spaces for finding kinship but also allowed for gross misunderstandings?
What human idiosyncrasies and intricacies cannot be turned off or mediated by technology?
How does the internet help queer folks discover themselves sooner, and what happens when the imagery supporting this discovery is primarily pornographic?
What happens when certain marginalized bodies (trans bodies; sapphic bodies; queer bodies; Black, Brown, and Indigenous bodies of color; femme bodies; women’s bodies) are made hyper visible as a result of increased access to online pornography but not made visible within public life or only made visible in an attempt to police and punish those bodies?
ABOUT THE ARTISTS
Dahlia Bloomstone
Dahlia Bloomstone is a Puerto Rican/American artist and Hunter College MFA (NY, 2022) graduate with a BFA from Bard College (NY, 2018). Bloomstone has exhibited with Hauser & Wirth (NY), 205 Hudson Gallery (NY), Rhizome (NY), Millennium Film Workshop (NY), Do Not Research (NY), CICA Museum (ROK), Hyacinth Gallery (NY), and Mass Gallery (TX), among others. Dahlia's work is also affiliated with the White Columns Gallery (NY) artist registry. She is the recipient of the SPUNY Actionist grant from the Mellon Foundation, the Master's Thesis grant from Hunter College, the Ox-Bow CIP scholarship, and a Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture fellowship. She has participated in residencies through the School of Visual Arts, Ox-Bow, and Foreign Objekt and recently attended the Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture. She was a Teaching Assistant at Hunter College from 2020-2022 and a Visiting Artist/Professor at UTAustin in 2023. At present, she is an LMCC resident on Governor's Island and a New York Community Trust Van Lier Fellow at Theater Mitu. Dahlia lives and works in New York.
ABOUT THE ARTWORK
Little Darlings, sick
Roblox
Little Darlings, sick (2024 - ongoing) emerged from an archive of strip club signage and ephemera from the pandemic. It is a playable video game built, coded, and designed in Roblox Studio, the popular children’s social gaming platform with many possibilities for in-game glitches and controversies related to strip clubs and sex clubs as they continue to appear on the platform despite constantly hiring moderators to get them deleted. This game thinks through the explicit nature of fatalities, sickness, and “HP” in games, media materialities, and their effects on corporeality– and the interpersonal and systemic issues workers in the erotic labor sector face especially amidst a global pandemic***; the first thing the player sees on the main menu screen is a sign that reads “Little Darlings CORONA VIRUS-FREE LAP DANCES.” with an erotic dancer in black lingerie next to the text with her arms up holding a mask and gloves.
Max Lander
Maxwell Lander is a gamemaker, photographer, and interactive media artist. They have been winning awards and exhibiting internationally since 2007 and, after publishing a book of photography exploring queerness and sci-fi aesthetics in 2016, they took a hiatus from photography to delve into game design, interactive media and immersive technology. In May of 2019, they completed his Master of Design in the Digital Futures program at OCAD University, where they explored technology’s engagement with the body through custom controller design and the use of VR tech outside of the headset. Most recently, they have released several tabletop roleplaying games, including one of Gizmodos best RPGs of 2022, Himbos of Myth & Mettle, and are starting to work in the creative space between analog and immersive games. They also spend altogether too much time studying old game books for the podcast they host with Aaron King, RTFM.
ABOUT THE ARTWORK
Flaccid
PC
Flaccid started as more of a stealth game. The idea was to make something that drew on my experiences trying to navigate sexualized queer spaces as someone who feels conflicted and inconsistent about gender. I wanted to use comedic physics to mirror the way it feels to exist in a body, specifically a trans, fat body, which directed the game a bit away from it’s original stealth goals and towards something much more arcade based and humorous. Now I would describe it as a high-speed, gender-dodging, obstacle course.
Seb Pines
Seb Pines is a multi-award winning game designer and editor making curiosities into roleplaying games and games into a collection of curiosities. Seb is a co-founder of Good Luck Press where they publish experimental roleplaying games and multimedia interconnected stories. Their artistic foundation is formed from their love of multi-medium storytelling and from their research into embodied game design done during their Master’s Thesis work at OCAD University. Their work in game design has been acknowledged both with academic and industry accolades.
ABOUT THE ARTWORK
VidChat.XXX
Interactive Fiction, Twine
VidChat.XXX was born of my frustrations of meeting new people as a COVID-conscious queer but ultimately is a love letter to cybersex, chatrooms, and roleplaying with fun flirty freaks online. VidChat.XXX celebrates the distance flattening intimacy that a webcam and a good imagination can offer and the way, both online and offline, queer people are always finding ways to fuck and find pleasure with one another. So take off your pants, get that keyboard in your lap, and I’ll meet you online 💋
Casper Sutton-Fosman
Casper Sutton-Fosman is a cross-disciplinary artist and academic currently based in Toronto, ON. Casper's work centers conceptions of identity through a trans and disabled lens, with a focus on tactile and interactive mediums, particularly time-based media, textiles, and digital work. Casper intentionally pushes boundaries between disciplines and mediums as a way to honor and explore Casper's own identity, outside of binary conceptions of gender and ability. Casper holds an MFA in Interdisciplinary Art, Media, & Design from OCAD University and a BA in Liberal Arts from Sarah Lawrence College. Casper has exhibited and held residencies in Toronto and New York, and Casper's work is in private collections across the United States and Canada. Casper is currently a member artist with Workman Arts and an RBC Emerging Artist Member of the Power Plant Contemporary Art Gallery.
ABOUT THE ARTWORK
inner circuitry
Unity 2D (Mac, PC, web)
The current digital surveillance apparatus that keeps watch over us all seeks to enforce normative gender and sexual identities. Thinking towards possible futures of queer resistance and new ways of intimacy means that technology might make possible, I am also thinking of the ways hegemonic systems might try to stifle that intimacy. This game is an attempt to combine aesthetics of hypertext and glitch to envision cyborg futures of physical/digital connection.
Tamika Yamamoto
Tamika is a non-award-winning designer, illustrator, and game-maker with five years of experience as a creative. She is excitable and tends to wear many hats, moving between various disciplines such as motion design, publishing, user interface design, and game-making. She admits to occasionally falling off the deep end with each. She deeply enjoys the act of creation in its many forms and is intrigued by how creative work can enhance our capacity to empathize and connect with others. Currently, she is expanding her expertise in interactive media, focusing on AI criticality, language models, and crafting narrativedriven games that convey values-embedded play.
ABOUT THE ARTWORK
little diary
Digital Game, Itch.io
little diary is a series of vignettes meditating on how technology has both hindered and facilitated my understanding of sexuality as a child living in and around the digital space, without having the words yet to describe who I was (or was becoming). In making this game, I was particularly interested in how technology — the internet, digital games — has informed our relationships with others and ourselves. Without knowing who I was, in what ways did technology inform my identity? How did my digital self conflict with, or align with, my offline self or what people said I was or had to be?
This game looks back on those childhood moments with levity and a dash of silliness. Growing up is hard — and growing up online can be extra weird.
ABOUT THE CURATOR
Bracy Appeikumoh
Bracy Appeikumoh is a writer and mixed media artist whose work centers reimagining desire and pleasure wholly divested from the diktats of empire and all of its baggage. Her erotic fiction takes place in queer futures embodying queer pre-colonial pasts; her non-fiction ponders how we get here. She is burdened by the urgent need to restore, preserve, and disseminate indigenous ways of being and knowing. Octavia E. Butler, bell hooks, Audre Lorde, Toni Morrison, June Jordan, Lorraine Hansberry, Maya Angelou, Claudia Jones.
ABOUT THE WORKSHOP LEAD
alexander martin / droqen
alexander martin / droqen is best known for starseed pilgrim, but has spent decades (too long, surely) thinking about and making games of all sorts - often slipping poetry and pixel art together, sometimes accompanied by photographs, multiplayer, or creative prompts. in recent years a Godot user, but enjoys working in many materials digital & otherwise.
ACCESSIBILITY INFORMATION
The InterAccess gallery has five steps from the sidewalk up to the main entrance with automatic doors. Once inside all facilities are on the same level with an accessible single-user washroom inside.
Reach out to art @ interaccess.org with any questions or requests leading up to the event.
Image courtesy of OpenArt AI with a prompt of cyberpunk, chrome bodies, restricting any depiction of faces or gendered elements