User:Barbs/T2 Assessment

WORK IN PROGRESS!

.✦ BEFORE XPUB

From 2020 until 2024, I studied a bachelor's in Creative Media & Game Technologies at Hogeschool voor de Kunsten Utrecht.

When I started the course, the industry was booming like never before.
It didn't last: due to the over-expansion and unsustainable business practices of the industry, the latter half of my studies had a dark cloud of constant mass layoffs looming over it, which have yet to stop. Along with the rise of NFT's and generative AI, I became increasingly disillusioned with the industry.

An excerpt from the artist statement I wrote during my graduation project in June 2024:

In an age of rapid technological advancement, economic upheaval, xenophobia and climate change, I feel driven as an artist and storyteller to imagine alternatives to the bleak future we are hurtling towards. If we don't imagine a better world, how will we ever be able to build one?

I use interactive art & storytelling to imagine alternative futures and ecologies, exploring our relationships with the non-human world (both nature and technology) along the way.

I came to XPUB looking for...

🌬️ ...breathe!

.✦ TRIMESTER 1

Radio Show 1: Art > Profits

I usually shy away from making anything to perform "live", as I'm so used to producing projects asynchronously from the audience experiencing it.

SI28's assignment to host radio shows immediately made me feel like being dropped into the deep end at the start of the course.

For the contents of my first radio show, we played excerpts from Tommi's interview with Brewster Kahle and discussed them.

I didn't fully agree with Kahle's opinion that capitalism is not inherently the problem when it comes to barring us from open knowledge & publishing practices. I agree more with Ursula K. Le Guin's point of view that profit incentives are inherently against the practice of artmaking and publishing, and played an excerpt from her speech about the topic.

The radio show itself went really well aside from some technical issues, even though I was quite nervous. It was a good way to help me step out of my comfort zone at the start of the course.

Radio Show 2: Cyberfeminism

The second radio show I hosted together with Sibyl and Youjung and was about (cyber)feminism.

In it, I read a text I wrote a few years ago asking the question "How do we write about machines?".

It details the depictions of female artificial intelligence characters in media and how they can be sexist but also a liberating narrative device for marginalized people.

Women as Technology exhibition at Design Museum Den Bosch

This exhibition showed the history of how technological advancements shaped the role of women and vice versa as calculators, homemakers, incubators and pleasure machines. I visited it during the autumn break and it served as a huge inspiration for the radio show.

Eliza & Feminist Chatbots

After the class about Eliza I really wanted to delve further into the topic of feminist chatbots but sadly was too short on time. I want to continue exploring (cyber)feminist narratives in the future!

🌬️ ...breathe!

A story in a story in a story

Inspiration: A Carrier Bag Theory of Fiction

Le Guin criticizes centralizing conflict in narrative and instead proposes the container as hero: a thing that holds something else.

Turning this research into practice, it sparked this idea to take the text literally as a game mechanic. Instead of a killer, you are a gatherer.

The idea

During Prototyping classes we were introduced to text adventure games and pen plotters.

Inspired by these classes, we created a text adventure game in which you explore the interiority of different words and gather them, which gets output to a pen plotter that draws all the words in your "bag".

I collaborated with Youjung and Kiki for this project.

Production

Usually in game production I would focus on the visuals, but instead I took responsibility for the technical side. Working with Python and a Raspberry Pi was unfamilar territory for me. I developed my technical skills rapidly in a very short amount of time during this project by following my curiosity, and it made me gain a lot of confidence in myself and my skills!

It also resulted in a completely different game-making experience. Instead of prematurely getting lost in artistic aesthetics and ideas, I really had to make my design choices concrete and functional so that it was understandable enough for me to code by myself. An example of this was iterating on the narrative design of how each word was linked using Graphviz.

Result & Reflection

Using a pen plotter to output the drawings to turned the game into a mixed-media project. The interactive element was part of something bigger. Different technologies coming together.

With the narrative design, I had difficulty finding the “why” behind some words and their connections, and I think a second revision of the word list would have helped the narrative feel more connected to our research and intention.

The public event was so engaging! So many people gathered around our table to watch others play. I had really good conversations. It felt way different from any other games showcase I had participated in during my bachelor's, where our tables were usually quite peaceful and more commercial-looking games were favored. I really feel like I found a space in XPUB where my work is appreciated and can flourish.

🌬️ ...breathe!

Brewing Permacomputing Collectives

Science-fiction has been the driving force behind most of my work, but I've been looking for ways to turn imagining better futures into real-world practice.

Permacomputing has been on my radar for a year or so now and when I started at XPUB I was really excited to find out that the XPUB and permacomputing circles are very tightly knit! Seeing these collectives gathered in The Hague together was so exciting!

Webgardener

Webgardener was made as part of the 1Bit Game Jam together with Dion Peek. The jam theme was "offering".

The game asks the question "What if hosting a website was a bit like caring for a garden?" and was inspired by digital gardening and the indie web.

Something that has stuck with me since is using game design to plant the seed of an idea inside someone's mind. Instead of literally explaining what the indie web is and teaching how to make a website, I kept it simple and instead just introduced the concept of caring for a web community through the metaphor of gardening.

Publishing games usually felt like sending them into the void without answer, but participating in this small game jam situated the game in a community. We got lots of kind responses because of it!

🌬️ ...breathe!

.✦ TRIMESTER 2

Peer 2 Peer prototype

Lea, Sibyl and I wanted to play with the intimacy of P2P file-sharing. We used SoulSeek & SyncThing to build our own "houses" out of the folder structures that the others could then explore.

It was fun to treat the P2P interface as a sort of adventure game, with the possibility of hiding all types of files in elaborate folder systems.

Using the home as a metaphor for a file system would later serve as inspiration for my workshop!

Datacenters

One of the highlights of the SI for me was touring the datacenter at the Van Nelle Fabriek.

It made me reflect a lot on the physicality of our digital worlds and the destructive impact it has on our real world and communities.

It also made me think about how the video game industry is inextricably entangled with big tech. I wonder what a games "industry" could look like without that influence.

Suncatcher

Made in collaboration with Dion Peek and Max Kuilman as part of the Global Game Jam 2026 with the theme "mask".

Inspired by the SI29 datacenter tour, Suncatcher is a cyberpunk interactive narrative with make-over game mechanics. You play as a hacker in a cyberpunk city trying to evade facial detection algorithms by crafting different kinds of masks. Your goal is to infiltrate and set fire to a hyperscale datacenter (Inspired by Remco's monologue about the importance of the fire suppression systems).

🌬️ ...breathe!

Permacomputing & Self-Hosting

Laptop maintenance

At the beginning of the special issue, I became very interested in taking better care of my almost 6 years old laptop. Learning more about permacomputing helped me shift the perspective that I should upgrade my tech as soon as it started to age. I really love this laptop, it still does everything I need it to do, and so I want to maintain it for as long as possible.

I ended up upgrading its storage, cleaning the insides, and dual-booting Linux alongside Windows onto it. It runs way smoother now!! I documented everything on the wiki page linked above too.

Communal servers & Comp(h)osting

Another interest that has started to develop during this trimester was self-hosting and communal server practices. I haven't found the time yet, but want to start self-hosting my own website and am talking with my friends about setting up a communal server together for our projects!

Workshop "Our Digital Home"

The protocol for the first half of the workshop.

The Inspiration

• Home as metaphor for file systems
• The physicality of servers
• Communal self-hosting practices

...culminated into the idea for the workshop I hosted together with Youjung and Tommi: Our Digital Home.

The Idea

A collective exploration of where our digital lives live, learning that the Cloud is actually someone else's computer.

• Using FTP to upload personal files to a website/server and share them with each other, collectively building a digital home.
• Exploring the physicality of that digital home. Finding its location using traceroute

The Production

I focused on the pedagogical aspects of the workshop. I was most interested in using the sharing of a house as a metaphor for the communal social practices of sharing a server/website.

It took a few iterations to come up with a protocol for uploading files to the server/website. It consisted of 4 rooms (shown in the image).

The Result

Because we were short on time, I asked the participants to choose between either doing the Kitchen or the Garden. I think they were avoidant of having to discuss together and instead saw the Garden option as "safer". I'm really sad we skipped the Kitchen as I think it would have allowed for more interesting group work!

[untitled games event]

Their definition of experimental games.

"a space for experimental games and playable arts in Amsterdam. We organize a monthly 'book club' for games and conversation around play."

Going here felt so refreshing!! Everyone was so excited and open to talk to each other, I spoke to a lot of game makers with very diverse backgrounds. I’m thinking of maybe hosting a talk here sometime.. once I think of something interesting to say.

.✦ METHODS / PERSONAL READER

Highlights:

• A Carrier Bag Theory of Fiction - Ursula K. Le Guin
• (re)programming Strategies for Self-Renewal – better machines for better humans - Marta Perano & Kate Crawford
• Situated Knowledges: The Science Question in Feminism and the Privilege of Partial Perspective - Donna Haraway
• The Mushroom at the End of the World - Anna Tsing
• Alternative Games From The Fringes Of Cyberspace - Nathalie Lawhead

Currently reading:

• Glitch-Feminism - A Manifesto - Legacy Russell
• Everything to Play For (How Videogames Are Changing the World) - Marijam Did
• Beyond awareness: Climate games as invitations to care for the future - Carien Moossdorff, Joost M. Vervoort

Want to read:

• So many things..

.✦ INTERESTS / WHAT'S NEXT?...

Reflecting on the first two special issues I'm proud of myself for immediately stepping out of my comfort zone, even if it felt scary at times. The radio shows during SI28 were something I would usually shy away from, and I was super anxious during them, but it went really well! Same went for working with python, raspberry pi, servers,

A word cloud of things that interest me:
science-fiction | worldbuilding | experimental games | cyber/techno/glitch-feminism | climate/eco games | permacomputing | games as art/poetry | sustainable game-making | retro game console hacking/modding | encountering the "other", more-than-human, patchwork beings, Frankenstein's monster | collective organizing | feminist servers | indie comic books | situated knowledges

What interests me about concept art? I want to visualize what does not (yet) exist but serves as inspiration for what could be I am drawn to interactive media as it allows for the viewer to literally put themselves in someone else's shoes, a sense of immersion, empathy and responsibility that rivals all other forms of media.

I feel sooo scattered and am having a bit of a career/identity crisis.