Artist Statement
I learned to listen to them [the threads] and to speak their language. I learned the process of handling them.
-Anni Albers, “Material as Metaphor,” 1982
While making in the studio, I find myself talking to Anni Albers whose above quote is about the process of weaving. Albers believed that making was a process of co-creating with the material. This is how I feel when I make open-world games in the game engine software Unity. I find myself engaging with many formulas that are “given” to the digitally created world, whether that is the world’s formula of time, space, or the rendering of light. Playing with these formulas is like playing with the plasticity of a material, like the give in clay, or a rough interaction between pencil and paper. For example, my work Infinity Fall exposes the material limits of digital number representation by creating a game where an object falls infinitely. The number becomes materially exasperated by the limited bit-space for its representation, and the object begins to break apart. My work Night Mode plays with interaction between “real space” and game space, taking images from wherever the work is installed, processing the images through filters, and placing them in the game world. My goal is for viewers to experience how formulas of space, time, and light might be imagined differently, akin to how art objects propose a different perspective on the world by playing with the material expression at its limits.
BIO
Kelsey Brod is an artist, scholar, and PhD Candidate in the Computational Media, Arts and Cultures program at Duke University. Brod’s dissertation uses performance theory in the arts and gender studies to reframe the techno-industrial use of computational performance beyond measurements of efficacy. Aligning with Afrofuturist and techno-feminist work, Brod argues that computational performance within “human-machine” systems engenders ontological possibility. They use the game engine Unity in their critical praxis to create open-world games exploring thresholds for being within the engine’s computational formulations of space, time, and light.
Brod received an MFA in visual arts and an MA in art history from SUNY Purchase, NY in 2019. She has most recently shown at the Rubenstein Arts Center and Power Plant Gallery in Durham, NC, PROTO Gallery in Hoboken, NJ, and the Hudson Valley Center for Contemporary Art in Peekskill, NY. A collaborative article, “Nothing Re-Fused: Performing the Neo-Institution,” appears in A Peer-Reviewed Journal About for Transmediale: For Refusal 2021-2022.