| Mar ’19 |
| 9 |
| 7:00 pm |
Come join the staff of the Video Game Art Gallery, the editorial board, and their colleagues in celebrating the release of issue 2 of the Video Game Art Reader, a scholarly peer-reviewed art history publication. The VGAR is an attempt to not only deepen the discourse around video games, but to also make it more accessible to the public and inclusive of marginalized voices. The theme for this issue was “survival strategy,” an investigation not just into the defined genre of “survival games,” but the methods by which all games can become tools for conditioning, coping, and creating within the digital world. Issue 2 includes works by Martin Zeilinger writing on the limits of digital performance art, Andrew Bailey examining how exploration of digital spaces can transform understanding of physical ones, Michael Anthony DeAnda investigating the consequences of digital surveillance, Luisa Salvador Dias discussing how video games depict war, Michael Paramo arguing for better representation of queer characters, and Treva Michelle Legassie probing the implications of rendering oneself in a video game. This issue also includes a practitioner statement by Elizabeth LaPensée on her water-protecting side-scroller, Thunderbird Strike, and an interview with the evocative game designer and scholar Anna Anthropy.
The event will begin at 7pm. Light snacks and refreshments will be served. Copies of the latest VGAR will be available for sale, as will the Chicago New Media 1973-1992 exhibition catalogue, also produced by the VGA Gallery. The event is free and open to the public.
For more info:
mreed(at)vgagallery(dot)com
Sat, March 9th, 7pm – Free Event
In Is This How You See Me?, Maggie and Hopey get the band back together — literally. Now middle-aged, they leave their significant others at home and take a weekend road trip to reluctantly attend a punk rock reunion in their old neighborhood. The present is masterfully threaded with a flashback set in 1979, during the very formative stages in Maggie and Hopey’s lifelong friendship, as the perceived invincibility of youth is expertly juxtaposed against all of the love, heartbreak, and self-awareness that comes with lives actually lived. The result is no sentimental victory lap, however — this is one of the great writers of literary fiction at the peak of his powers, continuing to scale new heights as an artist.
In Christina Ward’s new book 
