Game + Community Design

In Conversation with Izzie Colpitts-Campbell

Dames Making Games (DMG) founder Izzie Colpitts-Campbell speaks with us about her art and design practice and how her role as a community organizer influenced her contributions to the DEL. In this conversation we discuss her new DMG project Damage Labs, similarities between game design and community organizing, and how artist solidarity can be provoked digitally.

In this conversation, Dames Making Games (DMG) founder Izzie Colpitts-Campbell shares a brief history of her art and design practice, her motivation behind community organizing, and her thoughts on what drove her to participate in the Digital Economies Lab (DEL). Albeit a brief introduction to her collaboration on Artwork_Local404, Colpitts-Campbell contextualizes her vision for the piece through her experience in design and community solidarity. Countering the misconception that technology is pressuring artists to participate in capitalist models, Colpitts-Campbell asserts this isn’t new, “Leonardo da Vinci sure as hell did not want to paint Jesus.” So how are these discussions shifting in the digital world? Thus far, is the digital world exclusively designed for mass culture? Does the digital world, in its current conception, marginalize and even exclude communities? Does our engagement with digital tools, platforms, and services produce harm? As the world embraces a somewhat forced digital literacy in response to the pandemic, how do we navigate creating digital experiences that counter how digital spaces have been viewed previously? Follow along as we discuss these questions and more. As Colpitts-Campbell explains, there are more similarities between game design and community organization than we may have previously thought. Join us as we explore how game design, tech fashion, and new media art can advance culture and participate in community organization. Be inspired by DMG’s new project, Damage Labs, and their goal to create the gaming studios of tomorrow, today.

Explore Izzie’s projects here:

DMG Toronto: About

Join the Union here:

https://artwork404.com/

Platforms Empowering Artists to Take Back their Power:

Gain Context for these themes:

Potential History: Unlearning Imperialism

Head, Hand, Heart: Why Intelligence Is Over-Rewarded, Manual Workers Matter, and Caregivers Deserve More Respect

Artwork_Local404 Collaborators:

Tim Maughan (@timmaughan)

Emmanuel Madan « Undefine

Produced by the Artengine Stream Team:

Mikke Gordon aka Seiiizi https://twitter.com/s3iiizi

Ryan Stec

Kimberly Sunstrum https://www.kmbrlysnstrm.com/

Editorial Assistant

Erin Galt

Production Design Consultation

Leslie Marshall/MAVNetwork http://mavnetwork.com/

Post-Production Support: Chris Ikonomopoulos

DEL Theme Music by Mikki Gordon aka Seiiizi

Artengine’s Digital Economies Lab brought together a diverse group of artists, designers and other creatives to rethink the infrastructure of cultural production in the 21st century.

Funding for the Digital Economies Lab was received through the Canada Council for the Arts Digital Strategies Fund.

And like, it’s not ‘easy discussions,’ right? Particularly when you’re talking about personal prosperity, personal finances and economics, that’s a risk on the table…I think this is why often these movements come from marginalized people, because often they have much less to risk because they don’t have access to all of these systems that work for a very small amount of people. That’s why these movements often come from those that have less in the first place, because it is a hard thing to say, “A thing that’s working for me is not working for everyone else and I’m going to change that.”

I am the one who takes the approach of like, actually, let's build the studios that we want to see in the world.

How Does Culture Shape Sound?

What does it mean to speak of “aural culture?” What does listening offer, as a tool or technique for understanding our world, that visual perception cannot? The sounds that fill our lives are dense with information about the interwoven cultures to which we belong, and approaches to their investigation can take similarly varied routes. For Linda-Ruth Salter, language is a primary element of culture. Expressed aloud it is a richly coded meaning system, but it can also speak volumes when forced into silence.

Body Mind Machine

An engaging panel with Kristin Anne Carlson, Davide Rokeby and Chris Salter, moderated by Nell Tenhaff which delves into different relationships artists are cultivating with machines.

Interface: Art + Stability

What is software without hardware? Join us as DEL participant, artist and National Director of the Independent Media Arts Alliance Emmanuel Madan shares his vision for the viability of the Arts ecosystem and what role a union, Artwork_Local404, could play within that system. In this conversation, we discuss the importance of language, authorship, and time when it comes to the development of meaningful work (tools, platforms, initiatives and art).