“A selected collection of work ranging in medium and scope, including digital and mobile games; physical board, card, and outdoor games; interactive installations and animations; writings; films and videos; prototypes & sketches.”
Take Action Games
Traversing art, game design, activism, and documentary, Take Action Games is a multiple award-winning studio-collaboratory invested in the evolution of design that advances liberatory nonfiction storytelling and playful mechanics.
Data Bodies - Qareen
Data Bodies - Qareen is an Arab-futuristic single-player narrative videogame set in 2211. The location is the Middle, a sanctuary for global refugees in the Arab world. The project will be the first of its kind as an Arabfuturistic game that is, on the one hand, a future fantasy and, on the other hand, historically grounded in issues affecting the world today, including Palestine and the rest of the Middle East.
Watermarks of the Last Chinatown
A place-based public history artwork, accessible through mobile phones at the physical site in downtown Santa Cruz, CA where the last Chinatown stood. The project merges past and present by weaving together augmented reality, documentary filmmaking, oral histories, gameplay, historical fiction, archival photography, and volumetric video
Mountains after Mountains VR (산 넘어 산)
A virtual reality documentary installation that merges performance, animation, and immersive storytelling to center one woman’s autobiographical account of her illegal abortion in South Korea. The work invites visitors to reflect on generational hardship, Korean-American adoptee identity, and the enduring capitalist, patriarchal, and violent forces that limit women's choices.
Oceanic
A multidisciplinary artwork that includes a short film, a mobile app, and an installation at the Leslie Lohman Museum in New York City. The project combines dance, volumetric video, and theoretical texts by feminist scholar Gloria Anzaldúa to reflect on personal, collective, and environmental grief and to stitch the line from colonization to neoliberalism to racial capitalism.
Shelter-in-Place
During shelter-in-place due to the global pandemic, we made things as a family.
Game-Based Pedagogy: Playful Approaches for the Classroom
A collection of experiments investigating the opportunities and limitations of play-centric strategies in and for experiential mediamaking education. This work brings together play design, public pedagogy, film production & analysis, and storytelling.
so help you god
A longitudinal documentary project spanning nineteen years that examines the lives of six individuals serving life sentences in Tennessee, their families, lawyers, and community, while addressing the broader role of storytelling in justice work.
The Civic Tripod for Mobile and Games: Activism, Art & Learning
A report outlining the emerging field of mobile and pervasive games along three dimensions of (1) civic learning, (2) performance art, and (3) social change. Focusing on real projects from the field, it aims to reveal key opportunities and constraints on the mobile frontier for civic games.
Anti-Oppressive Game Design
Anti-oppression is a framework used in social work and community organizing that broadly challenges power imbalances between different groups of people in society. We position these principles in the realm of game creation and argue for their use – particularly in the development of social issue games that in one way or another seek to spotlight and challenge social power imbalances.
ideaDECK
A card game as pedagogical tool and platform to help undergraduate students quickly brainstorm and conceptualize ideas for scholarly crossmedia projects, consider the relationship between form and content, and incorporate technology in meaningful, strategic and thoughtful ways.
Transdisciplinary Practice: Notes Towards a Manifesto
A collection of video discussions with stakeholders and experts in the areas of game design, community organizing, Theatre of the Oppressed, and documentary filmmaking.
Clean Up Wall Street: A Game About Selling Trash
Speculative design for a location-based game inspired by Charles H. Ferguson's 2010 Academy Award winning documentary Inside Job utilizing custom game cards and smart phones. Playfully assuming the roles of commodity traders and credit rating agents in the actual spaces of Wall Street in Lower Manhattan, players compete to trade and sell before time runs out and the inflated system bursts. Design by Kristy Kang, Joshua McVeigh-Schultz, Veronica Paredes, Susana Ruiz, and Jeff Watson.
Experiments in Interactive Panoramic Cinema
This work is specifically designed to explore the properties and limitations of immersive experiences in relation to the codes of cinematic narrative by sidestepping the storytelling preoccupations of conventional cinema and instead focusing on notions of space, movement, and embodied spectatorship.
Urban Light from Day to Night
A collaboration with the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, this mobile app is a virtual flipbook in celebration of Chris Burden's iconic L.A. art experience, Urban Light. Design by Chris Guitarte, Susana Ruiz, Rokhsan Shafiei, and Rachel Wagoner as part of the first-ever iPhone app development class at the University of Southern California.
Barbie and The Middletons Break Loose
A multiplayer storytelling remix game system about the Barbie mythology and the tale of an American family attending the New York’s World Fair in 1939. The game requires a group to play with a willingness to tell, transgress and retell stories. Design by Sean Bouchard, Lauren Fenton, Andreas Kratky, Veronica Paredes, Susana Ruiz, and Hidefumi Yasuda.
ProjectCAR
While traveling alone together on the choked LA freeways, drivers are familiar strangers participating in a regular, large-scale social event known as rush hour, rarely engaging in memorable exchanges. The ProjectCAR platform converted a 1983 Volvo station wagon into a “Commuter Art Rig," creating a test bed for designers to explore interactions between people, vehicles and traffic.
