Project Space Residency

droqen/Alexander Clair Tseu Martin (Toronto, CA)

October 21 – November 18, 2027

Artist Statement

Hello! I want to make games and yet never release them for ‘playing’, never subject people to the pain and suffering of stumbling around blind within abstract systems of power until they come to understand and wield that ultimately arbitrary power for contrived ends. Does that make sense?

I wonder what’s left. I want to pursue beauty and freedom. I want to explore the thrill of the best parts of what videogames are and deliver nothing but smooth, perfect movement through imagined proprioceptive space. I want to take from games their fantasies of progress and achievement and mastery and discovery and replace all those illusions with transparent glass. I want to close my eyes and still feel the shape of the game, unburdened by gameplay.

It will, must, take some material form. Bits on the machine and pixels on the screen, bright.

I want to kill gameplay.

Bio

droqen/Alexander Clair Tseu Martin is a toronto-based game-maker who made hundreds of videogames (Starseed Pilgrim, Asphyx, Cruel World, etc.) over decades, then in 2024 became obsessed with the phrase ‘kill gameplay’ and made & released The End of Gameplay in 2025.

droqen is now: a tarot reader, an aspiring therapist, a poet, an urban sketcher, a pixel artist, a human being who loves long walks on the island, and inescapably still a game-maker. among other things.

Project Space Residencies are 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, and Monroe County, NY. Photography-based artists participating in the program receive support from the Phillip and Edith Leonian Foundation.