GAMESCENES

EVENT: SEQUENCEBREAK// (MARCH 20 - JUNE 28 2025, ROCHESTER)

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!)

EVENT: RADICAL SOFTWARE: WOMEN, ART & COMPUTING 1960-1991 (FEBRUARY 28 - MAY 25 2025, VIENNA, AUSTRIA)

Dara Birnbaum, Pop-Pop Video: Kojak/Wang, 1980, © Courtesy Dara Birnbaum und / and Eletrconic Arts Intermix (EAI), New York

Radical Software
Women, Art & Computing 1960–1991
February 28–May 25, 2025

Exhibition opening: February 27, 7pm

Symposium: February 28, 9am–6pm

kunsthallewien.at

Kunsthalle Wien Museumsquartier
Museumsplatz 1
1070 Wien

press release

Kunsthalle Wien presents a major new exhibition examining the pioneering role of women in digital art. Organised in collaboration with Mudam Luxembourg–Musée d’Art Moderne Grand-Duc Jean, Radical Software: Women, Art & Computing 1960–1991 brings together over one hundred works by fifty artists including painting, sculpture, installation, film, performance and many computer-generated drawings and texts.

A principally analogue exhibition about digital art, Radical Software focuses on the decades that preceded the rise of the World Wide Web and the proliferation of digital information and images that ensued, shaping artistic production and visual culture in the following decades. The exhibition is titled after the magazine that Beryl Korot started with fellow artists Phyllis (Gershuny) Segura and Ira Schneider in 1970. They adopted the term software (as opposed to hardware) as a metaphor and powerful tool for social change. The magazine’s wide-ranging editorial model and mission to serve as “an evolving handbook of technology,” decentralising access to information, predated the World Wide Web by two decades.

Beginning with works from the 1960s and 1970s, the exhibition spans a period from the first years of integrated circuit computing to the “microcomputer revolution,” which led to the birth of personal computing in the 1980s. The first works date from a time in which artists, poets, writers and filmmakers experimented with mainframe and minicomputers alongside mathematicians, scientists and engineers to produce and exhibit the first computer-generated images and texts. During these three decades the computer migrated from the laboratory to private, domestic space. Yet with each retelling of this history, the significant engagement of women with the technology has been largely overlooked. Set within a period that was also marked by the second wave of feminism, this exhibition documents a lesser-known history of the inception of digital art, countering conventional narratives on art and technology by focusing entirely on women.

Radical Software: Women, Art & Computing 1960–1991 also engages with contemporary questions of how technology interfaces with issues of identity and equality. The exhibition follows a renewed interest in the post-internet discourse of cyberfeminism, which highlights the role that women played in the creation of new digital technologies and engages critically with the entanglement of technology and power structures.

Artists: Rebecca Allen (b. 1953, Detroit), Elena Asins (b. 1940, Madrid–d. 2015, Navarra), Colette Stuebe Bangert (b. 1934, Columbus) & Charles Jeffries Bangert (b. 1938, Fargo–d. 2019, Lawrence), Gretchen Bender (b. 1951, Seaford, Delaware–d. 2004, New York City), Gudrun Bielz (b. 1954, Linz) & Ruth Schnell (b. 1956, Feldkirch), Dara Birnbaum (b. 1946, New York City), Inge Borchardt (b. 1935, Szczecin, formerly Stettin), Barbara Buckner (b. 1950, Chicago), Doris Chase (b. 1923–d. 2008, Seattle), Analívia Cordeiro (b. 1954, São Paulo), Betty Danon (b. 1927, Istanbul–d. 2002, Milan), Hanne Darboven (b. 1941, Munich–d. 2009, Hamburg), Bia Davou (b. 1932–d. 1996, Athens), Agnes Denes (b. 1938, Budapest), VALIE EXPORT (b. 1940, Linz), Anna Bella Geiger (1933, Rio de Janeiro), Isa Genzken (b. 1948, Bad Oldesloe), Dominique Gonzalez-Foerster (b. 1965, Strasbourg), Lily Greenham (b. 1924, Vienna–d. 2001, London), Samia Halaby (b. 1936, Jerusalem), Barbara Hammer (b. 1939, Los Angeles–d. 2019, New York City), Lynn Hershman Leeson (b. 1941, Cleveland), Grace C. Hertlein (b. 1924, Chicago–d. 2015, Chico), Channa Horwitz (b. 1932–d. 2013, Los Angeles), Irma Hünerfauth (b. 1907, Donaueschingen–d. 1998, Kreuth), Charlotte Johannesson (b. 1943, Malmö), Alison Knowles (b. 1933, New York City), Beryl Korot (b. 1945, New York City), Katalin Ladik (b. 1942, Novi Sad), Ruth Leavitt (b. 1944, St. Paul, Minnesota–d. 2025, Baltimore), Liliane Lijn (b. 1939, New York), Vera Molnár (b. 1924, Budapest–d. 2023, Paris), Monique Nahas (b. 1940, Paris) & Hervé Huitric (b. 1945, Paris), Katherine Nash (b. 1910–1982, Minneapolis), Sonya Rapoport (b. 1923, Brookline–d. 2015, Berkeley), Deborah Remington (b. 1930, Haddonfield–d. 2010, Moorestown), Sylvia Roubaud (b. 1941, Munich), Miriam Schapiro (b. 1923, Toronto–d. 2015, Hampton Bays), Lillian Schwartz (b. 1927, Cincinnati, Ohio–d. 2024, New York City), Sonia Sheridan (b. 1925, Newark–d. 2021, Hanover), Nina Sobell (b. 1947, Patchogue), Barbara T. Smith (b. 1931, Pasadena), Tamiko Thiel (b. 1957, Oakland), Rosemarie Trockel (b. 1952, Schwerte), Joan Truckenbrod (b. 1945, Greensboro), Anne-Mie Van Kerckhoven (b. 1951, Antwerp), Ulla Wiggen (b. 1942, Stockholm)

Symposium: Radical Software: On the first day of the exhibition, 28 February 2025, Kunsthalle Wien and TU Wien will host a symposium bringing together highly distinguished female researchers from the fields of art and science including Gerti Kappel, Nadia Magnenat-Thalmann, Margit Rosen, Zsofi Valyi-Nagy, Anne-Mie Van Kerckhoven, Ina Wagner and artists Gudrun Bielz, Inge Borchardt, Anna Bella Geiger, Dominique Gonzalez-Foerster, Liliane Lijn, Sylvia Roubaud, Ruth Schnell, Nina Sobell, Tamiko Thiel and Anne-Mie Van Kerckhoven.

Exhibition publication: The exhibition is accompanied by a new publication including essays by Tina Rivers Ryan, Margit Rosen and the exhibition’s curator, Michelle Cotton. Co-published with Mudam Luxembourg–Musée d’Art Moderne Grand-Duc Jean and Verlag der Buchhandlung Walther und Franz König, it features over 200 illustrations, a timeline and twenty-seven new interviews with artists from the exhibition.

Kunsthalle Wien is financed by the Magistratsabteilung Kultur der Stadt Wien (MA 7). The artistic programme is also supported by the members and patrons of the Kunsthalle Wien Club. The exhibition and symposium are made possible through the generous support of Art Mentor Foundation Lucerne.

LINK: Radical Software: Women, Art & Computing 1960–1991 

Previously

EVENT: CODE-X: CONTEMPORARY CHICANX CODICES (JANUARY 9 - FEBRUARY 23 2025, DENVER, COLORADO)

Code-X: Contemporary Chicanx Codices

curated by Rafael Fajardo

January 9 - February 23 2025

Vicki Myhren Gallery
2121 E. Asbury Ave.
Denver, CO 80210

press release

The Vicki Myhren Gallery is proud to present Code-X: Contemporary Chicanx Codices, curated by DU’s own Rafael Fajardo, Professor of Emergent Digital Practices. This exhibition brings together the artworks of more than a dozen Chicanx artists who reimagine the long tradition of the codex as a dynamic space for Chicanx storytelling. Ranging from painting and prints to comic books, zines, and video games, these artworks bridge the analog and digital. The artists mix the ancient, colonial, and modern to explore the complexities of contemporary life, including migration, Mestizaje, and cultural survival. Featuring many interactive artworks, this exhibition invites all visitors to play and engage with these innovative and thoughtful reworkings of the codex. 

One of the highlights of this remarkable exhibition is Leo Sailas' Barrio Bros., a platform game "set in an environment that draws heavily from Chicano and Mexican American heritage. Players navigate through levels teeming with various encounters and challenges. As Barrio, (the protagonist) players encounter imaginative enemies like hard taco monsters, (Crunchers WIP) navigating through platforms  that blend traditional motifs we are all familiar with and fictional elements." (Sailas)

You can play Barrio Bros here.

Leo Sailas' Barrio Bros. video game

LINK: Code-X: Contemporary Chicanx Codices

INITIATIVE: PALESTINIAN VOICES IN GAMES (ONGOING)

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