Copyright © Bryan LeBeuf and Morgan Green, 2020.
There is a tight bond linking the concepts of protocol and ritual. They share in the calm and deliberate execution of established procedure. The difference lies in the endgame: are we dealing with the production and maintenance of something material? Or something ineffable? This dichotomy is not always clear cut.
“Grid” evokes the ritual stability of protocol. It assembles forms from a variety of procedural arenas: circuitry, engineering, cooking, music composition. By overlapping domestic, industrial, and creative modes of production, “Grid” interrogates the socialized hierarchies that separate these spaces of work. It’s also different each time you play it. This difference references a special kind of freedom, present in the spaces of variation within established procedure.
“Grid” evokes the ritual stability of protocol. It assembles forms from a variety of procedural arenas: circuitry, engineering, cooking, music composition. By overlapping domestic, industrial, and creative modes of production, “Grid” interrogates the socialized hierarchies that separate these spaces of work. It’s also different each time you play it. This difference references a special kind of freedom, present in the spaces of variation within established procedure.
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About the Artist
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Bryan A. LeBeuf is a new media artist working with 3D imaging, sound and game design. His work examines community through collective memory, using overlapping experiences as a tool to rebuild and reimagine his neighborhoods in Detroit, MI. The landscapes and design draw inspiration from defined environments of early role-playing games and dating simulators, weaving together imagery of post-industrialized neighborhoods. Bryan constructs these environments from fragmented memories. These memories are stitched together from the collective unconscious of his immediate community, and materialized through games. Human subjectivity and the excavation and reconstruction of communal memory are major themes in his work.
Game culture has been a great influence not only in his life but in the ethos of his work. For Bryan, artwork can operate like a game instead of ending with the gallery wall. Games allow people to share experiences as they unfold in a real-time. Though gameplay can easily be a solitary activity, for Bryan it has always been a social one. He brings that ethos into what he makes, into designing experiences meant to be shared, and to dialogue within his community. Bryan holds an MFA from The School of the Art Institute of Chicago, upon graduation he was awarded the Toby Devan Lewis Fellowship as well as attending the Mana Contemporary New Media Residency program. Currently, Bryan is a HATCH resident at the Chicago Artist Coalition residency program. During this time, he is both working on an upcoming mobile game about the intersections of mental health, and growing imbalance of work-life busy culture, while researching and fabricating works for future programming. Each upcoming work is being designed to further the realm of accessibility within a larger community, focusing on free downloadable content on all platforms. |
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Morgan Green is a Chicago-based artist, writer, and coder. She uses computer programming to work with and around language. The linguistic roots of computation make it a rich source of insight into larger questions of signifying, and Green exploits this richness in her practice. She writes code to test the edges of procedure-driven expression, automating the production of texts and text-like forms. In this way, she frames tech and text as nested systems, which influence behavior and produce meaning. She is interested in how these systems can be intrinsically queer, and yet fail to accommodate queerness. She frames this paradox as the result of humankind's strange relationship to machine intelligence: we see our devices simultaneously as our lifeless servants and immortal progeny . Green's work has appeared at galleries and film festivals throughout the United States, and been collected by public institutions including the Special Collections at Amherst College and the Riverside Public Library. She teaches creative computation at the University of Illinois, Chicago. Learn more at howshekilledit.com
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