WordHack, 7pm on Thursday, February 21 @ Babycastles, New York City

WordHack is a monthly meetup / art thing hosted at Babycastles about the intersection of language and technology. "Code poetry, digital literature, e-lit, language games, coders interested in the creative side, writers interested in new forms writing can take, all are welcome here."

This month, I'll be presenting at this week's event alongside Tega Brain and Cynthia X. Hua on our practice / research.

My short talk will focus on localization in video games. I'll talk a little about the problem of localization / internationalization in games, and stress the importance of all media artists to try to maximize their audience and accessibility. Near the end, I'll demo the terrible bespoke localization system I've been using in my gay sex games for the last few years, and emphasize how internationalizing gay sex is a crucial political project.

The event always begins with an "open projector" period from 7-8pm where anyone can show anything they're working on, and then talks begin shortly after. If you're free then please consider coming out, it should be a fun night.

Suggested donation: $5-10

Babycastles
145 W 14th St (downstairs)
New York, New York 10011
(cross-streets: 14th St between 6 Av and 7 Av)

Thick skin: complexion, realism, and labor in games

In Dublin, I visited the Lucian Freud Project at IMMA.

If you're not familiar with painters (who is these days?) Lucian Freud is often held up as one of the greatest realist painters in the 20th century. And like many other artist men of the 20th century, his work also has a lot of racist and sexist baggage to deal with.

The IMMA curators figured out a pretty clever solution here -- they basically surrounded his stuff with women artists and intersectional feminist political theory. Instead of pretending to be a "neutral" celebration of a Great Male Painter, the curators did their job, and made an argument for real interpretation and criticism in the 21st century. It felt responsible and complicated.

The main basement gallery has two monitors in the middle of the room, running constant loops of John Berger's iconic feminist media studies primer Ways of Seeing. Specifically, it's Ways of Seeing episode 2, the one about the difference between nudity and nakedness, especially within the long history of European oil paintings depicting nude/naked women.

The second half of the episode is famous: the male narrator and host (Berger) shuts up and just listens to a panel of women critique patriarchy and art through their own experience. At first it seems like they're talking about the art shown in the film 30 years ago, but in the style of the Frankfurt School, they might as well be critiquing Freud's many paintings hanging on the walls today.

If you want to read more about the various artists and works, this Quietus post by Cathy Wade is a through walkthrough of it all. In this post, I'm just going to talk about one of the paintings and how I relate its form and politics to games:

For some reason, I gravitated towards a small painting hanging in the corner, a portrait simply called "Kai".