Data Like Clay: In Search of New Materials

February 6 – June 6, 2027

Opening Reception: February 6, 6-9pm

Data Like Clay: In Search of New Materials is a group exhibition featuring artists who collage, appropriate, sample, hack, and remix material from pre-existing videogame software and hardware to explore new forms of artistic expression and inquiry that interrogate contemporary media issues.

The artists featured in Data Like Clay are moochi/mut, GURN GROUP, Flan Falacci, Lawra Clark, and collaborators Stephanie Boluk and Patrick LeMieux. 

By referencing the iconography of popular and mainstream videogames, these artists are in dialogue with the games industry as well as today’s larger cultural landscape affected by artificial intelligence, the loss of consumer rights, algorithmic biases, and widespread enshittification.

Here, data, information thought to be locked beyond the screen, becomes bendable, sculptural material for the artist, a site for building and sharing original digital poetries. Through these acts of playful subversion, each artist finds new agencies within the complex relationships between players, games, and game developers.

Exhibited work will be interactive, encouraging visitors to spend time in the gallery to play and investigate. Through the exhibition and its related programs (which include in-person and online artist talks, workshops, game jams, and demonstrations), audiences will have opportunities to learn more about game development, tech-based art practices, and general computer and media literacy. 

Data Like Clay: In Search of New Materials runs from February 5 – June 5, 2027 in the VSW Gallery and is curated by Nilson Carroll. This exhibition is part of VSW’s commitment to supporting artists working with videogames, new media, and interactive arts.

Data Like Clay: In Search of New Materials is supported by The New York State Council on the Arts with the support of Governor Kathy Hochul and the New York State Legislature, The Joy of Giving Something Foundation, The Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts, Monroe County, NY, and all of our members and individual supporters!

mut/moochi is a Brazilian experimental game maker, curator, facilitator, artist, programmer, and player based in New York City. mut’s work is concerned with bodies (virtual and real) moving/playing/being in space (virtual and real), be it by constructing new bodies, or re-appropriating existing ones for new uses. mut is the creator of the 2025 Independent Games Festival Nuovo Award-nominated tapeçaria.

mut is invested in exploring the possibilities of playful collaboration, co-learning and collective work. They help organize Boshi’s Place, a games and playful media coworking space in Bushwick that also hosts events from both a creation and from a curation perspective. mut is part of collective *the parks staff*, the maintainers of dumpling.love, a radically collaborative website that allows multiple members of the collective to create an ever expanding collage of their creative work.

moochi enjoys the ability to make small videogames really quickly out of existing pieces of other videogames, reframing objects to a new context, in a practice some have been calling “plundercore”. Inspired by Patrick LeMieux and Stephanie Boluk’s text Metagaming, mut explores the use of actual existing, emulated videogames as materials to create new games (plunderludics). The texture, audiovisual, cultural and tactility of existing videogames is therefore part of moochi’s palette.

moochi believes in always maintaining a teaching and learning practice alongside the art practice, exploring ideas and references with peers, current or future, letting each other’s learning and aesthetic taste bleed and shape the kinds of work being made.

GURN GROUP is a software artist with interests in memory, software affect, and small-scale interactive texture. Assemblage-based game development integrating incidental video footage, free 3D assets, and emulated software (plunderludics). Gurn Group’s work has been exhibited at Babycastles (NYC), LIKELIKE (Pittsburgh, PA), and Boshi’s Place (NYC). Previously involved in curation at Death by Audio Arcade (now Arcade Commons) and Boshi’s Place. Gurn Group is currently working on a long-form RTS game called Lives of the Saints, interactive music for a 3D platformer called discone, and a plunderludics development tool called UnityHawk.

Flan Falacci is a game developer and artist whose work explores pacing, texture, sound, emotion, humor, sincerity, and digitally mediated existence. Their practice often involves collaging found assets like ripped models, phone camera videos, screenshots, and edits of popular music, weaving our everyday language into strange and hyperreal environments. Their work has been shown at festivals around the world, and was nominated for the Independent Games Festival’s Nuovo Award and the AMAZE Festival’s Digital Moment Award. They are a founding member of boshi’s place, a collective and exhibition space in Brooklyn focused on games and play, and an adjunct professor at the NYU Game Center.

LAWRA SUITS CLARK is a videogames artist, designer, and educator living in New York. Their work involves climate fiction, absurdist futures, death positivity, ambient play, and game mechanic as poetic device. Lawra has taught at various international institutions, such as School for Poetic Computation, NYU Game Center, Parsons Design & Technology, and Pratt Institute. As part of Babycastles, a volunteer run arts organization established in 2009, they also co-founded Babycastles Gallery (2014-2022), dedicated to showcasing contemporary independent videogames and other media by marginalized creators.

Stephanie Boluk is a media artist, scholar, game designer, and professor in the Cinema and Digital Media and English Departments at University of California, Davis. Boluk coauthored the groundbreaking book Metagaming: Playing, Competing, Spectating, Cheating, Trading, Making, and Breaking Videogames with frequent collaborator Patrick LeMieux, which was published by University of Minnesota Press. Boluk’s work has been extensively featured in the press, including websites such as Kotaku, Destructoid, and by the British Film Institute.

Patrick LeMieux is a media artist, game designer, electronic musician, and Associate Professor in the Cinema and Digital Media Department at University of California, Davis. His research focuses on game studies, media theory, audio production, and artmaking to explore the material practices and community histories of play, from speedrunning and esports to modular synthesis and installation art. He is the coauthor of Metagaming with Stephanie Boluk, cast member of the Every Game in This City podcast, and creator of interactive artworks like Footnotes, Triforce, and the Octopad.

LeMieux’s work has been exhibited widely around the world, including at SAAM Arcade at the Smithsonian American Art Museum, BitBash at the Museum of Science and Industry (Chicago), Seoul Innovation Park, Centro Cultural Kirchner (Buenos Aires), Animation Biennale (Shenzhen), JEF Festival at the Medialab (Antwerp), and many others.