Interactive Portraits: Trans People in Japan

Interactive dialogues about gender, revolution, and resilience.

"All the time I'm having to make up stories. Because you are a friend, I can confess about it this way, but you know, if you'd interviewed me just like all the other interviews by people who are like, 'what is a transgender?' I would have had to lie."

Explanation

This is a series of works that came out of a residency carried out in early 2018 in Tokyo, with the Creator Ikusei project, which is supported by the Japanese Agency for Cultural Affairs. I adopted research techniques from ethnography and history, such as open-ended interviews and participant observation, and developed a method of representing the results of this research in a playful and interactive form that draws heavily from familiar interaction design patterns such as the tamagotchi-style virtual pet and role-playing game multiple-choice dialogue systems.

Some of the development was funded by Making Ways, Sheffield City of Makers.

All of these pieces are made in Pico-8, a simulation of a 1980s computer that never actually existed..

Exhibitions

• Futurecade, Festival of the Mind, Sheffield: 20th - 27th September, 2018 | With Sheffield University
• Mozilla Festival, London: 26th - 18th October, 2018
• Rainbow Arcade, Schwules Museum, Berlin: 14th December, 2018 - 13th May, 2019
• Solo exhibition, ROAR, Rotherham: 13th January - 8th February, 2019
• Now Play This, London: 6th-14th April
• Docfest, Sheffield: 6th-11th June
• Freelands Artist Programme Work in Progress show, Site Gallery, Sheffield: August 2019
• SQIFF, Glasgow: October 2019

Installation: Interactive Portrait Cushions

In late 2018, an innovative new installation was created with funding from Arts Council England, using textiles by Anne Smithies and custom-made handheld consoles based on the Adafruit PiGRRL Zero. This creates an intimate space and a tactile engagement with the material, encouraging a sense of proximity to the material. The extensive use of textiles also encourages participation by people who might feel turned-off by the signifiers of videogames culture, creating a sense of a traditional domestic material culture colliding with avant-garde digital aesthetics.