Screenshot from Anthology of the Killer (2024) by Stephen Gillmurphy
SEQUENCEBREAK//
March 20 - June 28 2025
Curated by Nilson Carroll
Visual Studies Workshop
36 King Street
Rochester, New York 14608
From March 20 to June 28, 2025, the Visual Studies Workshop presents SEQUENCEBREAK//, a wide-ranging, genre-subverting arcade of experimental games and digital artworks. This exhibition challenges commercial video game aesthetics and logic, offering a critical lens on the culture of play through works that collapse boundaries between software and art, interaction and observation, story and glitch.
Curated by VSW Assistant Curator Nilson Carroll, SEQUENCEBREAK// is not a nostalgic throwback to coin-op cabinets, but a radical reconfiguration of what an arcade, and a game, can be. It includes work by Stephen Gillmurphy (known online as thecatamites), Nathalie Lawhead, Philip Mallory Jones, Cassie McQuater, and the artist collective Heart Street (Yuxin Gao, Lillyan Ling, Gus Boehling, and John Bruneau).
The exhibition title refers to the act of “sequence breaking”, a gaming term for disrupting a game's intended narrative or progression. Here, it becomes metaphor: each artist breaks the expected sequences of design, distribution, and interaction, revealing overlooked dynamics within digital culture.
Among the highlights is Out for Delivery, a first-person “playable documentary” by Heart Street. Set during the COVID-19 pandemic, the work follows a Chinese food delivery worker navigating the surreal, sometimes threatening environments of lockdown-era Beijing. Combining live-action 3D footage and game mechanics, the piece probes global labour politics and surveillance culture. It has already earned critical acclaim, including Indiecade’s Impact Award and a BAFTA for Immersive Art.
Irish game maker Stephen Gillmurphy’s Anthology of the Killer twists the murder mystery genre into something alien and cartoonishly grotesque, using surreal humour and pixelated dream logic to disrupt narrative cohesion. Known for creating dozens of freeware games over the past two decades, Gillmurphy remains a central figure in the DIY games scene.
Nathalie Lawhead, a longtime advocate for open-source tools and experimental storytelling, presents BlueSuburbia, a hallucinatory interactive world that expands upon their legacy of net art and zine-making. Their work is included in the Museum of Modern Art’s game collection and Rhizome’s ArtBase, and often critiques systems of control through absurdity and digital bricolage.
Philip Mallory Jones’ Time Machine: Bronzeville projects a speculative 3D reanimation of 1940s Chicago, chronicling Black life through immersive archives. With a career spanning over 50 years in media arts, Jones blends scholarship, historical preservation, and digital art in ways that make history tactile and haunting.
Cassie McQuater’s Black Room reclaims feminine iconography and retro aesthetics to craft a fragmented, contemplative space. McQuater’s cyberfeminist practice mines internet ephemera, turning visual debris into critique. Her past work has appeared at the Smithsonian American Art Museum, Rhizome, and indie gaming festivals globally.
In addition to the exhibition, SEQUENCEBREAK// features an active public programme that includes artist talks, walkthroughs, and outdoor workshops, all of which extend the ethos of collective experimentation. Events include an opening party (March 20), a conversation with Philip Mallory Jones (March 27), a live stream with Nathalie Lawhead (May 8), and a final celebratory gathering (June 26). Workshops like “Coding in the Park” on June 14 invite participants to break and remake code as a shared creative act.
Backed by the New York State Council on the Arts, the National Endowment for the Arts, and the William & Sheila Konar Foundation, SEQUENCEBREAK// asserts itself not only as an exhibition but as a platform, a call to rethink the conditions under which games are made, played, and valued.
In a moment when game culture feels increasingly corporatised and censored, SEQUENCEBREAK// reminds us that play remains political, porous, and profoundly strange.
LINK: SEQUENCEBREAK// (thank you, Nilson!)
