VIDEO: JACKY CONNOLLY ON ART21
In December 2025, Art21 released a new cluster of short films on Jacky Connolly as part of IRL/url, an ongoing series on the unstable conflation between physical and digital spaces. Directed and produced by Jonna McKone, Connolly’s three vertical (groan) videos — AI, Sims, Sound, and The Mineral Kingdom — move between upstate New York and the iconographies of The Sims, Grand Theft Auto V, field recording, and generative image culture.
Born in 1990 in the Lower Hudson Valley, in the State of New York, where she still lives and works, Connolly belongs to the small cadre of artists who have made videogame environments available for serious moving-image practice without reducing them to either technical stunt or fan homage. She received her BFA from Bard College at Simon’s Rock in 2011 and her MFA and MSc from Pratt Institute in 2016, a trajectory that helps explain the unusual density of her work, suspended between film, digital media, installation, and contemporary art discourse.
In Anhedonia (2017), built in The Sims 3 and The Sims 4, quotidian routines — sleeping, eating, meditating, staring at screens — slowly curdle into hallucination and psychic drift. In Descent Into Hell (2021), her extraordinary four-channel installation constructed within Grand Theft Auto V, Los Angeles appears as a post-Covid, post-capitalist hellish landscape made of endless fires, abandoned storefronts, neon signage, and environmental exhaustion, thickened by field recordings gathered around the artist’s studio. Connolly’s worlds feel inhabited because they are sonically and emotionally contaminated by lived experience. This unique pressure is what gives her machinima an unusual gravitas and an instantly recognizable style.
Her work helped move machinima beyond the older assumption that its value lay chiefly in technical improvisation, internet subculture, or formal novelty. With Connolly, the game engine becomes an instrument for thinking about spatial ideology, damaged subjectivity, domestic unease, and the afterlife of ordinary images.
This radical move has not gone unnoticed institutionally.Descent Into Hell appeared in the 2022 Whitney Biennial, and the work later entered the Whitney Museum’s collection. Those facts register a larger change: machinima is no longer confined to the margins of digital culture. In Connolly’s hands, it has become one of the most persuasive forms through which contemporary art can address synthetic environments and the emotional weather of networked life.
Connolly’s practice suggests that the most revealing images of life in the 21c now come from spaces built to simulate it poorly: suburban game worlds, dead interiors, synthetic skies, and environments where the ordinary returns with a distinctly damaged, and possibly irreparable, charge.