Vector Festival 2024 Game Jam: Gamemakers in Residence
The Vector Festival 2024 may be a month away, but our 2024 game jammers will soon be joining us for deu(s ex) machina, this year’s Game Jam Residency!
Please give a warm welcome to Dahlia Bloomstone, Max Lander, Seb Pines, Casper Sutton-Fosman, & Tamika Yamamoto. Our artists/gamemakers will be creating games under curator Bracy Appeikumoh’s lens and workshopping support from droqen, exploring how technology, the machine, and machina have both enriched and hindered our pursuits for sexual intimacy and understanding in relation to ourselves, one another, and the collective whole.
Join us on June 13th for the Game Jam kick-off: a keynote artist talk by new media artist and poet Shawné Michaelain Holloway, well known for her noisy experimental electronics and performance practice that shapes the rhetorics of computer programming and sadomasochism into tools for exposing structures of power. Following the event, attendees are invited to a social event at Blood Brothers, located within walking distance from InterAccess. This event is co-presented with Toronto Games Week.
ABOUT THE ARTISTS
Dahlia Bloomstone (b.1995) 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.
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.
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.
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.
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.