EVENT: KARA GUT (JUNE 12-25 2026, ONLINE)
YLOD [video for a bricked ps3]
single-channel video, colour, sound, 5 min 31 sec, 2025, United States of America
created by Kara Güt
June 12–25 2026
introduced by Matteo Bittanti
vral.org
YLOD [video for a bricked ps3] imagines a faulty character creation menu still haunting the interior of a PlayStation 3 that can no longer function. Made using Lance McDonald’s Dark Souls debug menu mod — a reverse-engineered restoration of developer tools removed from the shipped game — the work recruits an archaeological methodology to produce a field of glitched skins, corrupted spatial logic, and fragmented interface residue from within a console whose usefulness has permanently ended. The result is neither documentation of hardware failure nor straightforward glitch aesthetics: it is closer to an excavation of what a game system retains after the conditions of play have collapsed. YLOD has been shown at No Place Gallery, Columbus, Ohio (2025–2026), and was presented in the programme Digital Intimacy: Kara Güt at Go Short International Short Film Festival, Nijmegen, The Netherlands in April 2026, where Güt was designated Filmmaker in Focus.
Kara Güt (b. 1989, Cleveland, Ohio) is a multidisciplinary artist working in image-based digital media. Her practice investigates the altered forms of intimacy produced by internet life, mediated detachment, and the power relations embedded in virtual space, using the visual and narrative language of fantasy role-playing video games as a primary instrument. For Güt, game architecture is a diagnostic system through which social feeling becomes legible, and a set of tools — modding, machinima, debug interfaces, speedrunning — for operating outside intended rules. Her work spans single-channel video, live performance, installation, and publication. Major works include Intimacy Mod (2018–2022), in which the Skyrim mod Immersive Lover’s Comfort was used to stage encounters between avatars and interrogate whether desire translates without a physical body; Welcome to My Desert Nexus (2021), a three-act play performed live inside Red Dead Online; Lurker1 (2023), a 31-minute film drawn from a Twitch stream archive in which both performer and spectator accounts have since been deactivated. Across these works, glitch, platform failure, and hardware death are treated as the primary sites where the logic of mediated intimacy becomes most visible. Güt holds an MFA from Cranbrook Academy of Art (2016) and a BFA from Ohio State University (2012). She has been a resident at Pioneer Works Technology Residency, Brooklyn; the SPACES Artist Residency, Cleveland; the Banff Centre Visual + Digital Art Residency; and the Institute for Electronic Arts, Alfred University. Her work has been exhibited and performed at the Museum of Contemporary Art Detroit, Singapore Art Museum, Hybrid Box at Hellerau European Centre for the Arts (Dresden), Hesse Flatow (New York), Azkuna Zentroa (Bilbao), Las Cigarreras Cultural Centre (Alicante), and the Tbilisi Architecture Biennial, among others. Her films have screened at Go Short International Short Film Festival (Nijmegen), Oberhausen Short Film Festival, Milan Machinima Festival, and Viborg Animation Festival. She is a recipient of the Knight Arts + Tech Fellowship (2023) and multiple Ohio Arts Council Individual Excellence Awards. She lives and works in Ohio.