The Vector Festival Game Art Residency, curated by Bracy Appeikumoh, supports gamemakers in their development of conceptual video games, investigating video games as time capsules, time machines, and methods of contemporary memory-making. 

Jackie Liu, Julien Balbontin, Kahani Ploessl, May Yu, & Yixuan Rina Shan are joining InterAccess and Vector Festival, working towards video games for exhibition as part of the random access memories: Residency Showcase, running through July 17 – 19 at the Centre for Culture and Technology, with an opening on July 17, 7–9PM. 

ABOUT THE ARTISTS IN RESIDENCE 

Jackie Liu is a new media artist and digital designer currently based in Brooklyn, NY. Jackie makes playful, experimental and autobiographical work that blends web experiences, visual narratives, and games. Often drawing upon her experiences growing up alongside the 2000s web, her work remembers and reimagines technology to experiment with ways of relating with herself, others, and technology systems.

She has previously been an artist-in-residence at Welcome to My Homepage Residency, CultureHub, and a Year 9 Art & Code member of NEW INC, and has shown work at Public Works Administration, Dunkunsthalle, Iridian Gallery, and on the internet. She holds a Master’s from NYU ITP and a B.S. in Computer Science and Engineering from MIT.

Julien Balbontin is a Toronto-based designer and illustrator who is currently the Art Director at CONTINUE, a creative content outfit that focuses on the entertainment and video game industry. She specializes in brand identity, logo design, UI design, and digital marketing content. In her personal work, she focuses on tender moments in the mundane and the levity in grieving. She draws, designs, and doesn't.

Yixuan (Rina) Shan is a jack-of-all-trades artist located in the GTA area. She primarily works in the animation industry as character designer and 2D artist. She has provided work for Dreamworks, Adult swim and Kuro Games. She has also been creating and art directing games since 2023, including Echoes of the roots, a 2D/3D mash action game that is the Best Art Direction winner at Level-Up Showcase 2024. Rina is exceptionally enthusiastic about art creation, outreach and exploration on different topics. She is also creating comics and exploring other media to express her artistic self!

May Yu has a background in both computer science and fine arts, her artistic practice explores the intersection of human experience and technological systems. May Yu is particularly interested in challenging the sanitized, optimization-driven world of the internet. Instead, she embraces glitch, decay, and slowness—disrupting the seamlessness we’ve come to expect from digital interfaces.

May’s work often draws on retro aesthetics and outdated technologies, using them as both material and metaphor. Through hacking, repurposing, and programming interactive experiences—across physical installations and digital platforms—she reflects on themes of cultural identity, familial connection, and technological nostalgia.

Her work is a meditation on growing up alongside technology and its impact on the way she relates to others, to memory, and to herself. Whether through surreal simulations, performative tech rituals, or intimate interactive spaces, she strives to make work that prompts critical reflection on the systems we live within—inviting users to engage not as passive consumers, but as co-conspirators in the messy, glitchy, and deeply human side of technology.

Kahani (कहानी) Ploessl is a dimension-bending tech artist whose video game installations and generative artworks invent new, immersive experiences within extended and hybrid spaces. Guided by her Indian heritage, Kahani draws parallels between the cosmic philosophy of Hinduism and the glitched, evolving manifestations of digital realms. She reconnects notions of the avatār with the namesake’s Hindu origins, exploring identity, divinity, and spirituality as they extend into coded, virtual environments.

Kahani sees glitches as organic expressions of the digital, revealing the hidden nature and untapped potential of video games. Generative art—a fusion of rules, randomness, and emergence—creates infinitely unique outcomes. Yet despite being built from code, games often rely on rigid predictability. Kahani’s work asks: what happens when games are allowed to glitch, to drift from structure, goals, and endings? What is our relationship with digital worlds when they refuse to behave as expected?

This alignment between Hindu philosophy and digital media invites deeper reflection. Can game spaces, though man-made, be as valid as other spiritual dimensions? In merging our physical selves with avatar bodies, Kahani proposes a transference of intent—deepening self-expression, presence, and understanding across both realms and realities.

ABOUT THE CURATOR

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.