ESC -> CTRL -> PLY

Escape->Control->Play is an interactive exhibition that highlights video games as sites of resistance, spaces to imagine alternative worlds and opportunities for collaboration. This interdisciplinary group of artists, designers and historians from around the world use gaming to upend the homogenization of mass entertainment, using play as a means of cultural disruption and critical reflection. 

Visitors will have the opportunity to engage with bespoke, retro and cutting-edge gaming technologies, as well as VR storytelling and installation.

The exhibition will include the following projects: 

Derek Yu’s UFO 50, presented with 10 3D-printed, playable consoles manufactured from fan-developed free-ware plans. 

Two unique multi-player gaming controllers including Drexel gradate Erin Treusdell’s Haber Dasher, in which two players collaborate to control a giant hat, and A.M. Darke’s interactive controller that references the human body and the power of physical pleasure. 

Temple University Professor Adrienne Shaw will present a history of queer gaming, including games, artifacts and a timeline, emphasizing the ways that video games have created virtual and physical spaces for marginalized communities to gather, empower and imagine. Drexel’s own Ari Gass, a professor of digital media, will collaborate with Shaw on a selection of local contemporary queer game artists. 

Hsin-Chien Huang will present Bodyless, a VR experience that transports viewers to a surreal landscape inspired by the artist’s childhood memories of 1970s Taiwan under martial law.

Lu Yang will present an arcade game and video game film, The Great Adventure of Material World, that features fantastical, often morbid, visions of death, (a-)sexuality and neurological constructs of both real life-forms and religious icons, blending influences from anime, video games and sci-fi. 

Jeremy Couillard will present his video game Escape from Lavender Island, a playful anticapitalist critique, alongside a physical artifact of the game – a giant sweatshirt. 

Compost Co-Op will be presenting an installation suggestive of a post-natural landscape, in which a playable arcade game seems to be powered by waterborne controllers living in fish tanks. The game, inspired by experiences of trans-ness, both transgender and transhuman, takes the viewer on a journey of metastasizing liminal spaces that erase distinctions between physical bodies, digital realms and consensus reality.