I create immersive 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 are built in collaboration with programmers and use audio software, 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 fueled by the need to collaborate across cultural divides and disciplines in the pursuit of climate protections/solutions. Through the lens of artistic research, I use values-based 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.
We Called It Earth
Jessica Renfro and Hadi Asghari
Photo by Fenia Kotsopoulou
Once upon a time we called it _______...
We Called It Earth (2021) is a participatory, digital platformer game that simultaneously creates the world it explores. Rejecting the myth of self-authorship, the avatar of this game is a black hole with a profusion of unruly limbs controlled by multiple players. Participation also occurs online, where a new planetary mythology is co-authored, and appears on a projected screen to fill in the barren landscape and help the avatar on its way. In this messy, playful, and often deadly quest to bind the wounds of a shattered planet, a formless and emancipated collective writes the story of a new world forged by relationships rather than individuals.
Visitors are encouraged to bring a well-charged mobile phone into the theatre.
Dream City
Jessica Renfro and Hadi Asghari
Dream City (2020) is an online platform designed to harness collective creativity by combining visual media, music, and the gamified daydreams of visitors. In an introductory tutorial video, a mysterious being introduces a city that might exist far in the future. Visitors then enter surreal buildings and record their daydreams. At the same time, daydreams of other visitors appear on screen as shooting stars, co-authoring the mythology of this strange new city.
This piece was created in collaboration with programmer Hadi Asghari using Vimeo, Django web framework, and Heroku platform.
Social Isolation Beach Vacation
Jessica Renfro
Compost City: Etudes for a new normal
MaNN AUS OBST Ensemble
Compost City (2022) was an experimental music/performance art project performed throughout Berlin in 2022 by the improvised music ensemble MaNN AUS OBST.
MaNN AUS OBST sees the old world decomposing, and reaches for inspiration in the compost bin. Composting in these times feels like an antidote to our recent obsession with sterility and distance, and we are fascinated as we get our hands dirty in the decayed soil of old societal norms and limiting beliefs. As immigrants and transplants, we are searching for ways to grow deep roots, although our fruit may not be native to the region, and war and prejudice might seek to uproot us. Still, we dare to work through this compost, and look forward to a diverse and bountiful harvest in better times to come. It is through improvisation that we commit ourselves to honesty and present-ness, worming our way through the dirt and taking a leap of faith that love, life, and nature will prevail in the public sphere of our new normal if we do the important work ahead of us.
Take it, Bend it, or Leave it
Co-curated by Irina Baldini, Luiza Jaffe, Korina Kordova, and Jessica Renfro
2020 was a perfect time to take a close look at not just the rules, but their function. Engaging with performance, video art, installations, and more, this festival welcomed artists from around the globe to reflect on social rules, performance rules, unsaid rules, and on what rules could be.
In its documentation, I attempted to capture the free, wild energy of the evening by creating a fictional account of a visitor slowly descending into madness in the absence of sensical rules. I also incorporated live audio descriptions/hallucinations, photographs by Fenia Kotsopoulou and daz disley, and drawings made by visitors after the performances.
Social Isolation Beach Vacation (2020) fuses participation and co-authorship with the memories of anthropomorphized objects in order to stimulate the imagination and dreams of participants. In an effort to reach deeper than a flat and choppy video conference call, this performance relies on three actions, related through an aural score, that access a collective consciousness beach dimension. The first action is kinesthetic; this helps to create a multi-sensorial environment. The participant is asked to gather a container of salt and a container of water, as well as any items (e.g. sunscreen, beach towels, shells) that remind them of going to the beach. Next, they are asked to watch a video while interacting with these materials—pinching the salt, running fingers through the water, combining the two ingredients, if they like. They may watch the video or close their eyes as they listen. This is presented as “contact with the beach entity”, the first step towards traveling to the beachdimension. Participants are instructed to leave the video playing after the entity departs, listening to the sound of the waves and awaiting further instructions. Lastly, after being guided to lay in a comfortable position and breathe deeply, participants are asked to picture themselves at the beach. They are given verbal prompts, during which they allow their minds to wander and dream. The prompts are presented in a slow and non-linear manner, distilled from the dream of the previous participant. I cut each dream text back to what I interpreted as its essential elements, using present tense and emphasizing actions and descriptive words. This resulted in vivid poetry, and creates a co-authored landscape.