Black Room

Participants

Vernissage: Friday, November 2nd, 2018
4 pm – 5:30 pm
Exhibition until November, 11th, 2018
At Technoculture, Art and Games (TAG)

Artist: Cassie McQuater

In Black Room, you play as an insomniac on the verge of sleep, moving through shifting states of consciousness. Hallucinatory, pixelated visions of landscapes filled with characters from the games of your childhood appear as you click through fragile internet spaces. Often interrupted, you continually return to the Black Room, a meditation technique your mother taught you for falling asleep, visualizing black flowers in a black vase on a black table in the center of a black room. Conceived as a feminist dungeon crawler, this game features a majority female cast of video game sprites from the 1970s-current day. This work seeks to bring these characters together to form new narratives: Chun Li reposes in a desert oasis filled with flamingos; Catwoman cartwheels across the nighttime beaches of Coney Island; Jennifer Simpson, the lead character from Clock Tower, runs endlessly through the brightly pixelated fantasy landscapes of the Oregon Trail.

Image: Cassie McQuater, Black Room