Overview

Since 1969, Visual Studies Workshop has supported experimental and expansive art practices, providing space for artists to explore new forms, technologies, and ways of working across mediums such as photography, book arts, installation, and media art. 

Historically, VSW has been a site for genre-expanding projects and exhibitions. Digital Check-Up, for example, was a landmark exhibition curated by Brian Goldfarb in 1993 to showcase interactive software about health and medicine. This exhibition highlighted revolutionary media and AIDS education software, while bringing together artists, educators, and medical professionals, blurring the boundaries between art, science, and community practice.

Today, VSW’s work with games and interactive media continues this trajectory: bringing artists and emerging technologies into conversation and creating spaces where new forms of artistic practice can flourish.

Since 2021, VSW has expanded this commitment to art and technology through a growing focus on experimental and artists’ games. Through exhibitions, arcades, workshops, and residencies, VSW supports artists working with games as an expressive medium. 

Artists’ Games

The phrase artists’ games centers the artist or maker, focusing on their intentionality and methodology over the videogame as a commercial product. Anyone is a potential artist, and making games should be open to all in the same way that anyone can use language to write poetry or pick up a pencil to draw. Artists’ games use the vocabulary, possibility, and interactivity of games as a mode of creative expression, from highly personal, diaristic games made by solo developers to large-scale, cutting-edge projects that are critically engaged with the medium.

Programs

VSW supports experimental games and the artists making them through many of its program areas:

• Major exhibitions and short-term “pop-up arcades” connect audiences with games artists, turning the art gallery into a dynamic interactive environment

• Workshops and game jams provide access to knowledge and tools while building community between games and arts audiences

• Project Space Residencies for new media and games artists provide time and space to develop and showcase new work

Exhibition

Since 2022, VSW has hosted pop-up arcades featuring games made by a wide range of artists and collectives. These events transform the gallery into a space for exploration, play, and dialogue, giving audiences the rare opportunity to encounter games in a physical, communal space. Some of the artists featured include droqen, Jenna Caravello, Barnyardia (Blake Andrews and Frank DeMarco), and Yames.

In 2025, VSW presented SEQUENCEBREAK//, a group exhibition curated by Nilson Carroll featuring five experimental narrative games made by international artists. Running from March 20 – June 28, 2025, SEQUENCEBREAK// was a fully interactive exhibition that challenged expectations about videogames through genre-defying experimental play, radical aesthetics, and alternative ways of telling stories.

Rather than reducing videogames to simple entertainment products or toys, the exhibition approached games as spaces for artistic expression, critical inquiry, and new forms of audience participation. Philip Mallory Jones’ Time Machine Bronzeville, for example, blends a rich array of interactive 3D scenes, audio recordings, historical photographs, newspaper clippings, and other ephemera to provide a vivid re-creation of the Bronzeville neighborhood in Chicago, known as the “Black Metropolis” in the early 20th century due to its high concentration of black-owned businesses and thriving artist community.

Another game, the award-winning Out for Delivery, developed by the artist collective Heart Street, is a 42-minute interactive documentary shot with a 360-degree camera. The slice-of-life experience follows a food delivery courier in Beijing on January 23, 2020, the day Wuhan shut down due to COVID-19. Both games offer insight into the histories and narratives of real people while deepening the audience’s understanding of what games can do or be.

In conjunction with these exhibitions, artists also give public artist talks, lectures, or demonstrations about their work. These conversations provide insight into the ideas, tools, and processes that artists are working with and give opportunities for audiences to engage and learn. During SEQUENCEBREAK//, for instance, artist Nathalie Lawhead led a virtual walkthrough of their recent games and zine-making software over Twitch as well as for a live audience in the VSW theater. 

Education

Education and empowering artists is central to VSW’s mission. Through low-cost and free workshops and skillshares, VSW seeks to make game creation tools more accessible to a broader audience. These creative workshops encourage participation from a wide range of skill levels. Most workshops require little or no previous programming experience. They emphasize discovery and experimentation over technical expertise, and promote agency for artists in the face of an increasingly complex digital landscape.

VSW has hosted a large number of workshops exploring a variety of beginner-friendly tools including Unity, HTML5, p5.js, and open-source, browser-friendly tools like Bitsy, Flickgame, and Twine.

The first VR workshop at VSW was held in October 2022 and was led by Rebekkah Palov and Nilson Carroll. The workshop was made free for participants through support by the New York State Council on the Arts through the Immersive Art and Technology Initiative. Artists with different backgrounds (filmmakers, painters, dancers) learned the basics of Unity and created fully original 3D environments.

Game jams provide another way for artists and makers to experiment with a specific game-making tool during short, one-day sessions. This format encourages discovery and collaboration, and demonstrates that games as an art form are accessible to makers who may not consider themselves game developers. Through these events, artists from a variety of backgrounds and skill-levels are empowered to make games and interactive digital media.

Each game jam season culminates with a public arcade showcasing the games made, giving participants an opportunity to share their work with engaged audiences in a physical space, further building a sense of community. See examples of games made during the game jams here.

In 2026, VSW was able to grow its game jam series with more events for more participants from funding support through ArtsBloom, part of the City of Rochester’s Percent for the Arts Program.

Project Space

VSW’s Project Space Residency is open to artists working in a variety of fields, including photography, book arts, film and video, and new and digital media. The residency provides artists with time and space to develop and present their work and artistic practice. 

For artists working with games and electronic arts, a residency gives valuable room to experiment with new forms and tools, engage with different audiences, conduct research, and develop work that operates outside commercial games industry standards (profitability, genre conventions, distribution).

“My residency at VSW was a great environment for deep, heads-down work on my media art/games practice–having a dedicated studio and quiet time away from day-to-day responsibilities allowed me to learn and experiment with skills like 3D animation for the first time, and the public open studio event was a motivating milestone to work towards. I was also able to explore games culture in Rochester (like at the Strong National Museum of Play), which was generative for my project inspired by arcade culture and history.”

– Jackie Liu, December 2025 Project Space Resident

Future Vision

VSW sits at the intersection of experimental and expansive art practice, public exhibition, community engagement, and arts education. We believe that games are a legitimate expressive artistic practice that needs support and community to flourish. For many games artists, who solely conduct business through online platforms and social media, a physical location to work, connect, and exhibit is rare and vital. VSW provides an alternative space to inspire artists and makers to develop the games medium without constraint, toward personal expression and creative possibility. 

As our cultural landscape is increasingly mediated by software, artificial intelligence, and algorithmic bias, it becomes even more important to focus on media and computer literacy, and to demonstrate that technology is not a black box designed to keep users out, but an invitation in toward new forms of expression and personal empowerment. 

VSW hopes to continue to expand the number and variety of workshops related to art and technology, provide greater opportunities and resources for artists to develop and exhibit interactive work, and build a thriving artist community around experimental games and game-making in Rochester and abroad.