My practice grew out of sandbox games like The Sims 3, where I spent hours customizing avatars and worlds until the seams showed—Sims ignoring commands, walking into cabinets, slipping out of bounds. Who was steering: me, the avatar, or the rules? That question drives my passion for worldbuilding.
Text Textures is an exploratory environment that withholds conventional goals. Navigation is open-ended, and at times control is removed entirely: the avatar can seize the camera, distort its body, trigger dialogue, and look back at the player before returning control. I script refusal—those childhood misbehaviors of Sims walking into walls become mechanics. A mirror-based customization echoes “Create-a-Sim,” but the avatar may reject edits: “I’m not your toy to twist and stretch,” then exit the world in a prewritten self-destruct—agency performed yet already encoded. Overhead, a dome of live, scrolling code exposes the system’s guts—contradictory comments, overrides, kill sequences—revealing the ideological biases and political assumptions developers smuggle into “neutral” programs.
Womb World extends this inquiry as a feminist counter-game. It began in painting after repeated encounters with anti-abortion protest posters on campus—fetuses floating in blank space, images that claim to reveal a hidden interior while erasing the body that carries it. Ultrasound, our dominant picture of the fetus, often does the same: cropped cords, monochrome voids, an isolated figure. In response, I build strange digital interiors in Blender and translate them into paintings—counter-worlds that are uncanny and funny, grotesque and sacred. Fluids become architecture; foreign objects become protagonists. Wire hangers echo the trauma of unsafe abortions, Lysol recalls its history as a deadly contraceptive, tampons recur as agents, and bread and wine reappear in Yeast Infection, where illness becomes a twisted liturgy. Menstrual blood swells into oceans and bathtubs; semen cools into wax; an orgasm erupts like a waterpark. These materials refuse shame and animate new worlds.
The project later became a game that rejects shooter loops of grind and kill-count: no enemies, no wins, no waypoints. I invert controller mappings so the player’s agency stutters—the point is to inhabit, not to conquer, in a medium long centered on cis-male dominance. The opening scene tethers the player’s actions to a giant hand in a bloodied bathroom; removing a tampon and dropping it into a toilet zooms us through a vaginal opening into the first biome. Disorientation—not dominance—advances the experience. You arrive in a village of womb figures, all staring at a candle that drips white wax into a pond; on closer inspection, a figure empties a condom of the same white substance into the pool while another lies abandoned nearby. As you approach the flame, you’re transported and become a human-faced sperm, “smelling” for eggs, drawn toward two ovarian figures cradling a cave with a copper IUD. Contact kills you—copper is poison to your kind—and a new world appears: you tumble into a yeast-infection party of bread and wine. You navigate by being navigated—tugged, rebuffed, redirected by a living system.
Across these works, agency is a negotiated relation among player, avatar, code, and body. I design refusal, inversion, and visible seams so power fantasies give way to complicated intimacy—worlds that look back, push back, and insist on their own terms. Here the “game” doubles as a consent machine: control is borrowed, bartered, sometimes refused.
