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Wiley Wiggins

I am an artist and curator focusing on a history of digital games. I’ve worked as an actor (Dazed and Confused, Computer Chess), Animator, User interface designer, and as the creative director of the Fantastic Arcade international games festival in Austin, Texas. 

My current work focuses on different modes of game-world apprehension, using the web, games and game engines, electronics, generative text, print, sculpture, 2d animation, 3d modeling and sound as a laboratory for imagining new selves, histories, and distributions of power.

What brought you here? Where are you going after?

Initially I was looking for ways to make complex behaviors from collections of lots of little agents with their own simple rules, hoping that I could extend this into some grid-based 2d animations I’m working on. I think after completing the course I have a deeper consideration for what those behaviors might represent. Ideas about introducing randomness and failure and about interdependence have helped steer the direction I’m taking my work. I’m also now thinking about CA rules operating outside of grids, like as in the movement of characters in the node-based maze of my current game project.

Something you would want to have happened differently? How would you want it to have happened?

I would have loved to have taken this class while not in the final quarter of working on my Thesis for school 😅

It would have been cool if it had happened last year, lol. 

Something you would want to do again or more? What made you feel like that?

It might be fun to do some more direct collaborations with the other students. Everyone is so cool and talented!

What was your worst and best memory of each week?

I don’t have any bad memories except of getting stuck trying to make something for the last homework. Best memories are of seeing what everyone is working on/interested in.

Would you share a moment that you felt lost and one that you felt creative?

I felt creative when I was working with a tool and some constraints but with an open ended/creative goal. I felt a little lost when I was left to my own devices to do anything without some constraints and then I ended up getting stuck trying to do something too ambitious (as I often do)

Do you feel you have made a new connection? With people, subject, practice, idea, etc... Have you deconstructed one?

There’s definitely folks in the class I would love to stay in touch with, even if only to see what direction their work & lives go in. I’m also more energized to try textile work like weaving.

Did you see any peer work or works that caught your attention?

Lots of cool stuff, Nay’s nature path CA and Helen’s response. Liam’s risograph CA’s! All the stop motion animations!

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