SEQUENCEBREAK// is an upcoming exhibition taking place in Spring 2025 at VSW. This dynamic, multimedia exhibition will feature works by artists who challenge mainstream commercial video game culture through genre-expanding experimental play, radical aesthetics, and the use of DIY, counter-capitalist methodologies. The exhibition will offer an in-person opportunity that is unique to the contemporary experience of playing digital games, while opening a broader dialogue with a virtual audience through streaming artist talks, workshops, and gallery tours. A detailed schedule of events is forthcoming.

The artists featured in SEQUENCEBREAK// are Stephen Gillmurphy “thecatamites,” Nathalie Lawhead, Philip Mallory Jones, Cassie McQuater, and Heart Street (Yuxin Gao, Lillyan Ling, Gus Boehling, and John Bruneau). This exhibition is curated by Nilson Carroll, VSW assistant curator.

SEQUENCEBREAK// is made possible by the National Endowment for the Arts and the William & Sheila Konar Foundation.

Stephen Gillmurphy aka thecatamites is a prolific Irish small games developer known for their experimental, satirical, and genre-defying freeware games. thecatamites has been making and supporting games in several DIY/alternative games communities for almost two decades. Their work has been featured in major games press publications such as Rock Paper Shotgun (UK) and exhibited at art spaces like babycastles (NYC) and Apexart (NYC).

Nathalie Lawhead is a net-artist and game designer that has been creating experimental digital art since the late 90’s. Past works include titles such as the IGF winning Tetrageddon Games, “Everything is going to be OK”, and the Electric Zine Maker. Their art exists in the complicated intersection between art and games. Nathalie is a proponent for and creator of widely used open source, DIY digital tools. Nathalie’s work is featured in places like the Rhizome ArtBase, and in the video game collection of the Museum of Modern Art. They have earned numerous awards and honors, including the Independent Games Festival Nuovo Award, Indiecade’s Interaction Award, and A MAZE’s Digital Moment Award.

Philip Mallory Jones is internationally recognized as an innovator and educator in the media arts, with a career spanning more than half a century. Jones was co-founder and Director of Ithaca Video Projects (1972-1984), and the Annual Ithaca Video Festival (1975-1984). Internationally, Jones has conducted research, production, and exhibition of his media art in the Caribbean and Central America, Europe, West and Southern Africa, South Pacific, and India. Jones’ work has been supported by the Ford Foundation, Rockefeller Foundation, National Endowment for the Arts, American Film Institute, Corporation for Public Broadcasting, Smithsonian Institution, New York State Council on the Arts, among others. Jones has held faculty positions at several institutions, including Batza Distinguished Scholar in Art and Art History, and Colgate University. Jones is Creative Director of Alchemy Media Publishing Company.

Cassie McQuater is a new media and video game artist living and working in Los Angeles. Her practice involves hours of surfing the net, mining for digital artifacts, and repurposing them as a way to reflect on and reinvent our relationship with interactive storytelling. Grounded in the practice of net art, investigating networked systems of digital power, her work often deals with themes of cyberfeminism while critiquing and seeking to subvert sexist tropes in video games and media.

Exploring modes of representation and cultural production, she frequently distributes work for free over the web, as a way to give back to communities. Her work has been shown and featured as part of the Smithsonian American Art Arcade, with New Museum’s First Look: New Art Online, at many DIY gallery arcade spaces and at alternative game festivals around the world, and has won awards including the 2019 Independent Games Festival Nuovo Award, Rhizome micro-grant for net.art, and the 2019 Lumen Prize.

Heart Street (Yuxin Gao, Lillyan Ling, Gus Boehling, John Bruneau) is a loosely structured collective created by indie game artists in New York City. Individual members have served as founding members of other game and art collectives. Heart Street projects often bring expertise from other fields into games.

Heart Street’s playable documentary Out For Delivery has received prestigious awards including Indiecade’s Impact Award and the GSA BAFTA Immersive Award and has been exhibited at the Museum of Pop Culture (Seattle, WA) and at Now Play This (London, UK).