Interactive Portraits: Trans People in Japan

Interactive dialogues about gender, revolution, and resilience.

Warning: these works use glitchy visual effects that are probably not safe for people with photosensitive epilepsy. Please be careful! "All the time I'm having to make up stories. Because you are a friend, I can confess about it this way, but you know, if you'd interviewed me just like all the other interviews by people who are like, 'what is a transgender?' I would have had to lie." Explanation

This is a series of works that came out of a residency carried out in early 2018 in Tokyo, with the Creator Ikusei project, which is supported by the Japanese Agency for Cultural Affairs. I adopted research techniques from ethnography and history, such as open-ended interviews and participant observation, and developed a method of representing the results of this research in a playful and interactive form that draws heavily from familiar interaction design patterns such as the tamagotchi-style virtual pet and role-playing game multiple-choice dialogue systems.

Some of the development was funded by Making Ways, Sheffield City of Makers.

All of these pieces are made in Pico-8, a simulation of a 1980s computer that never actually existed..

Exhibitions

• Futurecade, Festival of the Mind, Sheffield: 20th - 27th September, 2018 | With Sheffield University
• Mozilla Festival, London: 26th - 18th October, 2018
• Rainbow Arcade, Schwules Museum, Berlin: 14th December, 2018 - 13th May, 2019
• Solo exhibition, ROAR, Rotherham: 13th January - 8th February, 2019
• Now Play This, London: 6th-14th April
• Docfest, Sheffield: 6th-11th June
• Freelands Artist Programme Work in Progress show, Site Gallery, Sheffield: August 2019
• SQIFF, Glasgow: October 2019

Installation: Interactive Portrait Cushions

In late 2018, an innovative new installation was created with funding from Arts Council England, using textiles by Anne Smithies and custom-made handheld consoles based on the Adafruit PiGRRL Zero. This creates an intimate space and a tactile engagement with the material, encouraging a sense of proximity to the material. The extensive use of textiles also encourages participation by people who might feel turned-off by the signifiers of videogames culture, creating a sense of a traditional domestic material culture colliding with avant-garde digital aesthetics.