Presenter: Samantha Gorman, Co-Director of Art/Game Studio Tender Claws

Description: Work by art/game studio Tender Claws has launched nearly every immersive media AR/VR platform and found collaborators and community within the worlds of games, film, fiction, performance, art, and computational media. Studio co-lead and project director, Samatha Gorman, will show behind the scenes development of projects in media arts and games to discuss strategies for conceptualizing, prototyping and creating projects within a constantly evolving media landscape. Attention to the affordances and constraints of emerging media will be presented as a prompt for pushing design boundaries on mediums that have not yet been codified. The importance of attentiveness to media history and critical themes in designing game mechanics and narrative will also be touched on as a way of building critical and self-referential reflection into interaction mechanics: mechanics that are meant to expose mechanisms of play and inspire wider conversations about technology and how emerging media is developed and defined.

Bio: Samantha Gorman is the co-director of art/game studio Tender Claws. She specializes in interactive fiction, digitally mediated performance, narrative games, design for emerging/early mediums and has worked with VR/AR since 2002. She is an assistant professor in Art + Design at Northeastern University. Work by Tender Claws appears in The New York Times, Vice, BBC, Verge, Forbes, Wired, LA Times and Engadget. Industry accolades include: PRY (Apple’s “Best apps” 2015, IGF Excellence in Narrative). Virtual, Virtual Reality (VVR) (Google Play “Best VR,” Unity Awards, and Raindance “Best VR”). Tender (Sundance New Frontier with Google VR/AR). The Under Presents (2019) is a theatrical VR narrative with live actor performance. Actors ran daily Nov. 2019-2021 (SXSW Innovation Finalist, Finalist Juried Emmy). Samantha also created “Tempest” (2020) a ticketed, remote VR Play. Her current work focuses on creating live theater in collaboration with AI and writing/directing scripts for Stranger Things VR. She is also an artist in residence at The San Francisco Opera (2022-2024) where she designs for future stages and audiences.

Hosted by: Professor Noah Wardrip-Fruin

Join us in person or on Zoom: https://ucsc.zoom.us/j/91511410946?pwd=M3FqbjdJM3llRXV0YzFEaE5UK2toUT09

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