rtist Statement
I create immersive participatory experiences using original music, narration, visual images and digital interactive techniques. My work explores the concept of the collective and what emerges when participants co-author new mythologies from a disidentified
state. These social simulations use open source game engines and web platforms to explore alternative ways of being and being together.
The simulations I build are playful, brightly colored, and surreal; often evoking the aesthetics of 90’s video games and websites. The ‘win-state’ is designed to be a sense of collective accomplishment, embellished by the awkwardness, difficulty, and sometimes even silliness of achieving this.
My work is motivated by the need to collaborate across cultural divides and disciplines in the pursuit of climate protections/solutions. I work collaboratively with programmers, using values-based design and iterative game design models to create conditions like creativity, access, cooperation, and resilience in collective tasks. My pieces are shared experiences from which larger conversations can be had. They are ideal for community events, conferences, schools, and libraries, and require no prior knowledge of art or gaming.
essica
enfro
articipatory
performance
Compost City: Etudes for the new normal
(with MaNN AUS OBST ensemble)
Take it, bend it, or leave it festival documentation
(available only on desktop or large screen)
Social Isolation Beach Vacation
Archives from the Age of Touch
(with Eryfili Drakopoulou)
esearch
#procedural analysis #participation #connective practices
#procedural authorship #game design #participation
#heterotopia, #digital cultures, #participation, #climate change
#practice-led research #participation #social simulation
#participation #values-at-play #simulation #interdisciplinary
#participation #values #collective intelligence
#participation #case studies #utopia
#participation #emanicipated spectator #image schemas
ounds/Music
Audio Essay
Co-Authoring the Future: Stories from the road (2019)
Framed by the metaphor of a road trip, this exposition explores the use of participatory performance in building cultural discourse about decision-making during the climate crisis. Using Rancière’s concept of the emancipated spectator, common human experiences such as childhood development of subjectivity (acquired through Lacan’s mirror phase and symbolic order) and image schemas (as discussed in Mark Turner’s The Literary Mind) are explored as possible strategies for co-authoring an artistic landscape alongside spectators. An audio narration accompanies the written work, attempting to explore these theories in the form of a correspondence between the author and her elusive self-awareness. Each track reflects on these individual-but-common experiences as a method for creation. The author concludes that a co-authored artistic landscape may only be accessible to participants who are enticed to set aside limiting social norms in order to explore it, and this is the challenge of the artist.
Soundtracks
Dream City
The Playroom
Mouse museum
City air
We called it Earth
Optimistic Wanderer
Music for writing
Lonely city
Singing/Opera
Audiobook Narration
essica Renfro
is a Berlin-based performer,
game designer, and artistic researcher using digital participatory practices to create playful, immersive social simulations that explore the concept of collective agency. She has performed as an opera and oratorio singer throughout the US and Europe, and since 2017, has written, produced and performed several multimedia productions in Europe and the US such as Lost in the Woods (2017) for the Philadelphia Fringe Festival, Dream City (2021) at Dutch Design Week, and Ètudes for the new normal: Compost City as a member of the Mann aus OBST ensemble (2022). She holds a M.M. and G.P.D. in voice and opera from the Peabody Conservatory in Baltimore, and in 2021 received an M.A. in Performance Practices from ArtEZ University in The Netherlands. Her research into participatory art has been
published and presented in the APRIA journal (2020), the Politics of the Machines conference (2021), the co.iki ‘Memory and Memoricide of the Land’ residency (2021), the mur.at Initiative Netzkultur Worklab (2022), and the 13th Annual Society for Artistic Research Conference (2022).