Zoyander Street

I am an artist, researcher, and critic. My practice focuses on videogames, but also involves other forms of media art and (mis)uses of technology, including livecoding music, hardware hacking, and glitch art. I like to work with toxic garbage, be that through recycling old computers that were destined for landfill, or through recontextualising trauma in history and ethnography.

Media Art

I have an art studio in a building used by around 20 artists on the site of a working specialist metal and ceramics foundry in Sheffield. I primarily use this space to play with computers and electronics: I make interactive works using videogame creation tools, take apart old devices and make them do new things using Arduinos, and create non-fiction works using hypertext, video, and playful new media.

My first short film was featured at the BFI Flare Festival and received the Rising Star award at the Transforming Cinema festival: Skeleton in a Beret. I have previously published three books on the design history of games: Dreamcast Worlds, Delay, and Digital Bodies.

Research

I have been researching material culture in connection with digital media since 2011, when I was studying for an MA in History of Design at the Royal College of Art and Victoria and Albert Museum. Today I am undertaking a part-time PhD at Lancaster University in the department of Sociology, supervised by Lucy Suchman and Adrian McKenzie.

My PhD thesis is about how game developers working on emerging platforms have conceptualised the emotions of players. More generally, my research is aimed at the generation of sympathetic critiques of technocultures and non-dualistic queer readings of human-computer interaction.

Language

As a professional translator and editor with almost a decade of experience, I bring advanced linguistic skills to a wide variety of tasks. Communicating complex and abstract ideas to the public has been a key part of my practice for most of my career; more recently, I have been able to apply these skills to helping artists and designers describe their projects and practice to audiences and funders. I also translate academic writing and artist statements from Japanese into English, as well as working as an editor and crosschecker of other translators' work.

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