Intern Testing Facility is an interactive narrative game exploring the universe of Tough Guy Mountain, where audiences try their best to get to the very top of the bottom of the corporate ladder. Navigate the fever dream of late capitalism through character dialogue as you encounter industrious interns, malevolent mini-mountains, and wispy wayfinders.
The narrative was developed in collaboration through the Tough Guy Mountain Board of Directors Tabletop Role Playing Game. Using the figure of the intern as a personification of the artist’s relationship to their (often unpaid) work, the TGM collective creates interactive and performative new media projects with the intern center-stage.
Instructions: Best enjoyed ‘full screen,’ accessed by the arrows at the bottom right of the game window. Click the black button with three dots to begin playing Intern Testing Facility; or, select here to play directly on itch.io (opens in a new tab).
Feature Image: Tough Guy Mountain, Intern Testing Facility, game title page, 2023. Courtesy of the artists.
Image description: A figure ascends a black and white staircase approaching an open gate with pink light spilling out. At the bottom of the image text reads: “Tough Guy Mountain’s Intern Testing Facility.”
Tough Guy Mountain is a collective creating art about unpaid internships. For TGM, the intern personifies the relationship between artists and their (often unremunerated) work. TGM creates interactive narratives and performances featuring the interns of the fictional Tough Guy Mountain corporation. Blending performance, video games, and roleplay with virtual reality technologies, their work explores the fantastical universe of the Brandscape and its cast of interns, managers, and executives. Founded in Toronto in 2013, TGM includes Iain Soder, Jonathan Carroll, and Cat Bluemke, who have worked with many more collaborators since its inception. The collective’s work has been exhibited across Canada and internationally, including recent exhibitions with the New Museum and Rhizome (NY), InterAccess and Vector Festival (TO), and Eyelevel Gallery (Halifax). [www.toughguymountain.com]
Iain Soder is a Canadian artist working in theatre, game design, and technology. Their work investigates present-day power structures and re-imagines them as comedic and dramatic narratives with characters both clownish and complex. They co-created the Tough Guy Mountain Artist Collective (2012-present), and the Brandscape Artist-Run Center (2016-2021). Iain studied Intermedia at NSCAD, puppetry at The Bread and Puppet Theatre, and vocal performance at Mount Allison. Their work has been featured by The Art Gallery of Ontario, Powerplant Gallery, Art Toronto, The Summerworks Performance Festival, Rhizome, The New Gallery, Interaccess, and Trinity Square Video.
Cat Bluemke is an artist working with game design, performance, and expanded reality. Often working through collaboration as the collectives SpekWork Studio or Tough Guy Mountain, her projects use mechanics of play to examine technology’s influence on contemporary labour. Exhibiting across Canada and internationally, she has shown recently with Rhizome and the New Museum’s virtual reality platform and the 2018 Venice Architecture Biennale with the American Pavilion. Since 2019 she has worked for the MacKenzie Art Gallery (Regina, SK, Treaty 4 Territory) in the development of their digital art programs, including the co-curation of Minecraft art residency series Ender Gallery and the creation of a digital exhibitions toolkit.
Jonathan Carroll is an Augmented-, Virtual-, and Mixed Reality artist and developer creating games and software. With a foundation in performance art, his practice evolved from creating applications to facilitate audience-performer interaction to focus on building engaging interactive experiences for mobile, desktop, and headset platforms. His work has been shown at the Art Gallery of Ontario, the Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago, and through Rhizome in partnership with the New Museum. Working as Digital Exhibitions consultant at the MacKenzie Art Gallery (Regina, SK, Treaty 4 Territory), he is developing a digital exhibitions toolkit as well as co-curating the Minecraft art residency program Ender Gallery.
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