SPEAKING - Sessions
Somewhere along the line, to be specific, some points in the last decade;
- since my self-organized graduation screening of SHRUG in 2009, that 7 min. handrawn film scrawled under a stooped Nordic mountain, where otherwise absent teachers suggested I make a book…
- through helping a lover instruct traveller/volunteers in making her clay house a country later…
- becoming an “artist-in residence” to get myself a DIY crash course in game-making, the reluctant decision of crowdfunding and starting a tiny company…
- moving from military baracks to a couch, to a ship’s bunk, surviving on catering and seasonal tourism jobs, moving across another border, and finally, finally, releasing our first artistically motivated commercial game… Somewhere along that winding road, it became apparent that I’d need to become comfortably uncomfortable in turning experiences into speaking segments.
A crazy imbalance in creation/communication ratio, needed to move along in a career of making moving artwork my professional thing. So, that’s also a big part of making Shrug Island.
(TLDR : Here follows an abstract of the latest talk I gave at IndieCade Festival in Santa Monica in October 2018.
PERSONALLY PROFESSIONAL - finding harmony in conflicting movements
“This visual talk is about the many paths to indie survival. How feeding your identity struggles may inspire others, and the ups and down in the serious business of making games personal.
In early days of my time in games, a coworker suggested I learn to separate personal from professional life. Years later, it’s become obvious I not only failed that class, but that failure was likely the largest factor in allowing a barefoot clay-wielding queer artist with a fractured sense of community and home, to crowdfund a metaphoric prototype, found a company with a stranger twice my age, raise significant funds and interest while essentially homeless, to release an art game, develop other interactive work for cultural heritage, and inspire people from diverging backgrounds to reconnect to important parts of themselves through games.
It covers the importance of interface (in-game and beyond the game), 5Ps in the Price and Power of Polish; Perfectionism, and Poetry, timeless time and other systems of measurement. It evokes the risk and reward ratio, Kickstarter, biomimicry, artwork, taxes, bootstrapping a team, accepting loss, selling dreams and composting the scraps.
Tolstoy once wrote : If you want to be universal, start by painting your own village. What’s singular in a game as well as in the process of making it, can be a mediator. Like many, as well as a cultural product, we see games as practical acts of transformation, aesthetic spaces to carry meaning. There are so much works of the mind…ours aim to represent the heart. A kind of flawed truthful essence many call for, in games and media in general, so we wanted to make it.
Including others in a process that’s so personal (when your game fantasy embodies your crushes, your grandmother’s death, your breakup, moves, musical urges and questioning identity…) can be as dizzying as it is debatable. At times stripping yourself bare and at other times, stripping yourself of the equation completely; so another can find their home, aspirations and battles in it.Those unlike you or what you represent because you’re building games for others and you need others to make it happen. It takes what it takes, to work with passion, and also accept to polish mold off walls that are not yours.
This talk is about being both gentle hustler and genuinely yourself.So hopefully people can see themselves in you, and find in games personal ways to move and be moved. “
The talk duration can be adapted to anything between 25 and 45 min.
When closer to 20 min, it ressembles a Post-Mortem of the two games I developed between 2013 and 2018, Shrug Island, and ShipShape, presenting philosophies, personal logic and creative frameworks that bridge the two diverging experiences. Closer to 50 minutes, it expands into questions of community building and the blurred lines of co-creation, towards a social positioning of games and art as private and shared interfaces.