Reception and performance 

Wednesday, June 11, 2025 | 5 – 8PM 
In person at InterAccess (32 Lisgar St, Toronto ON)
FREE, registration here

Gallery hours

June 12 – 13, 2025 | 12 – 6PM 
In person at InterAccess (32 Lisgar St, Toronto ON)
FREE, no registration required

xXx_FANTASYLAND_xXx is an interactive, interdisciplinary project that combines music, live performance, and video games to create a dreamlike landscape which captures the objectification of trans and racialized bodies. Artist Yves Al-Sharifi performs remixed iterations of a cumulative electronic musical EP that reacts to the player's gameplay experience: a walking simulator through a collection of disjointed video game environments inspired by early surrealist PS1 era graphics that act as an allegory for the performer’s home. The DJ-style performance focuses on improvisation, repetition, and audience reception to provide a responsive soundtrack that reacts with the player’s interactions. The project merges the two distinct mediums of video games and live performance through an experience where audience members are invited to come up and play the game on the monitor, while other audience members can watch both the gameplay and Yves' performance. Intimacy, voyeurism, and the lack of respect and privacy for female bodies become a surreal landscape based on our experienced sexualization. 

The project utilizes the Open Sound Control (OSC) protocol to send packages between the Unity Game Engine, Max/MSP and Ableton. This allows the music being produced to change and modify the game, and interactions within the game environment are able to directly affect the soundtrack being made. The physical installation consists of a gaming setup with a retro LCD computer monitor across from Yves’ performance space where she is surrounded by CRT TVs, clothes sprawled on the floor, and game controllers from pre-existing consoles and monitors.

The work places the audience in an unexpected position as both a victim and watcher to the fetishization of the performer. Players gradually become more aware of the performer’s involvement in their video game experience through expressions of intimacy and desire towards the audience within the music being performed, creating a feedback loop that watches and is watched. xXx_FANTASYLAND_xXx utilizes the medium of video games as both a storytelling tool and an interactive framework where the player’s participation is integral to the meaning and experience of the work’s sonic composition. 

This project is presented as part of IA Gateway and Toronto Games Week

ABOUT THE ARTISTS 

GENESIS INC. is a duo collective made by Yves Al-sharifi and May Yu, a team of artists working collaboratively on this project with an interest in developing future multimedia work under this identity. Yves’ practice focuses on mending writing, live performance, and sound design into multimedia works that span innovative and early 2000s digital technologies alike. Many of her inspirations are rooted in horror and liminal spaces that portray experiences not typically seen in queer contexts. May comes from a background that blends computer science and fine art. Her practice involves hacking and repurpose retro technologies and aesthetics along with programming interactive experiences through tangible and digital mediums. Together they develop interactive sound/live performances using game interfaces as methods of interaction. Commenting on technofetishism and gender identity through the lens of marginalized bodies, GENESIS INC. utilizes transgressive interactive art to assume uncomfortable, un-defined spaces that sexualized and objectified bodies populate, visualizing these situations in absurdist and holistic game and sound design that moves between physical and digital spaces. Assuming the facade of a corporation existing in 2000s internet culture, their work plays on the emergent ARG form of storytelling that relies on mystery, moving spaces, and dwindling paths that players can navigate through non-typical DIY approaches to storytelling and puzzles. Their work borders on the guttural and mystifying dynamics in common public-facing art, using audience interactions to blur the lines between performer, audience, player, and voyeur.

ABOUT IA GATEWAY

The InterAccess Gateway (IA Gateway) program facilitates low-barrier, no-cost access to gallery space for new media artists within our community. “Gateway” is an entry point; the term refers to network gateways, telecommunication devices that allow for the flow and translation of data between separate networks – an apt metaphor for the responsibility of organizations to provide resources and support to the artists in their community. IA Gateway was first held in 2024.