Minecraft to metaverse: a year of experimental art and curation inside proprietary platforms.

This month, Ender Gallery, the Minecraft Artist Residency operated in partnership with the MacKenzie Art Gallery comes to a close with the release of its exhibition resource packs.

2020 was the year the art world was forced to acknowledge the computer, relegated for decades to niche-interest institutions or novelty technical demonstrations. The COVID-19 pandemic thrust the brick and mortar-based cultural sector into cyberspace. With countless exhibitions cancelled or closed, many galleries pivoted their programming to the web, engaging the paradigm of proprietary platforms that make up Web 2.0. It was an exciting time to be a digital artist. Potentially. In practice, we got skeuomorphic digital white boxes populated by jpegs, patchy Zoom-rendered audio, and unexpectedly intimate encounters with curators’ bedroom walls.

In 2022, this conversation has been complicated by the rise of NFTs, web3—which positions itself linguistically as the successor to web 2.0—and the concurrent interest in metaverses. Together, all of these trends helped fuel the 2020 art world’s accelerated slide into the digital.

What is a metaverse and who decides? The term “metaverse” still feels flexible—but the window will close, and perhaps now is the moment to make an epistemological land grab. In Future Art Ecosystems vol 2. Art x Metaverse, published in 2021 by Serpentine’s R&D platform, the metaverse is defined through seven qualities: it is spatial and three-dimensional; it is real-time; it is shared with multiple concurrent users; it is persistent or continues to exist outside of user interaction; it is a single reality perceived through hybrid virtual and physical layers; it is interoperable and allows for exchange of assets across worlds; and that it generates functioning economies that merge with and influence the global economy.¹ By many of these measures, Minecraft could be a metaverse. It hinges on what exactly counts as sufficient interoperability or integration of assets, because, while most game content is free and openly replicable, there is also an official marketplace.

Ender Gallery explored the latent space of the digital exhibit ecosystem. Considering the videogame server as a site for both artistic creation and experience, we (co-curators Sarah Friend, Cat Bluemke, and Jonathan Carroll) placed an open call in late 2020 for projects to be created entirely in the videogame Minecraft. Conceived at least partly in the context of pandemic online exhibitions, and taking place in the 3D world of the game—which may or may not be a metaverse—Ender Gallery walks between the two impulses without fitting cleanly into either. And that’s interesting—it is useful sometimes, to be a little illegible. But it also comes with its own unique questions, among them: how to think about space, what new practices of documentation are needed, and what it means when your exhibition space is a proprietary platform owned by one of the largest software companies in the world. Mojang’s Minecraft, now owned by Microsoft, was publicly released in 2011 and has since become the best selling game of all time.² At time of publication, it has between 2.8 and 3.6 million daily players.³ Minecraft is an open world game where the player is confronted with a vast generated terrain and no clear objectives besides survival—they can harvest resources, interact with creatures (friend and foe), craft increasingly rare or complex items, and build structures. But most choices and almost all storytelling are in the hands of the player. The game also has a creative mode where resources are infinite, survival is assured, and the only significant player activity is building and exploring. It can be single-player, one person independently on their own computer, or a user can connect to one of many community-run servers. These servers cater to different genres, hosting worlds focused on creative worldbuilding, survival, player vs player, or role playing to name a few. There are “modded” servers that use Minecraft as a base to build new games and servers that cross over to fandoms like The Lord of the Rings or Pokemon. By emphasizing user creation and spanning many types of experience, Minecraft has garnered mass appeal. This has led to its adoption within education, music, and entertainment sectors; meanwhile, it remained relatively untouched by the art and critical gaming communities. The possibilities were apparent, though, through the multitude of artist applications received by the Ender Gallery call.

Each artist proposed a project they would work on for two months in a digital artist residency format; this would be followed by a two month public presentation of their work. Both residency and exhibition would take place on a Minecraft server, with its own digital world containing three realms and space equivalent to 60 million metres—about five times the diameter of Earth.⁴ With such immense space for virtual worldbuilding and the ability to change much of the game itself, applicants were encouraged to propose projects that would critically examine the platform’s affordances and its limitations.

The more than one hundred proposals received by the open call were strong, and they contained diverse approaches to the game. Artists who had predominantly worked within other media were inspired to connect the game with their existing practices, while artists already working with games, or even already working with Minecraft, saw the potential in experimenting within an existing platform. Ultimately, we selected four project proposals, resulting in four public exhibitions: (g)Ender Gallery by Cat Haines; Odanak—At the Village by Simon M. Benedict; How to be an artist in Minecraft by Huidi Xiang; and Change Language Resource Pack by Travess Smalley.

Cat Haines’ (g)Ender Gallery combined photography, poetry, and monumental Minecraft builds to explore the platform’s potential for queer and trans intimacies. Haines is an artist and academic based in Regina, Saskatchewan, who uses autotheory and interdisciplinary practice to unpack her experiences as a post-surgically transitioned femme. (g)Ender Gallery, a playful transfeminist intervention into the yonic art canon, centred on a colossal reconstruction of the artist’s vagina, doubling as a cavernous gallery of text and images reflecting upon the artist’s transition.

The vagina gallery is built into a cliff, situating it somewhere between sculpture, architecture, and land art. It has been constructed from a custom block, which is a new exhibition-specific game item, transformed by Haines from the game’s original concrete one. When you pull up the material in the in-game menu, the item names now read Labia Majora, Labia Minora, and Vaginal Cavity. The texture or photo that wraps the 3D geometry of the block was taken by the artist from actual photographs of her body. During the opening, she described the process: “I have transformed hard concrete blocks into subtle and soft representations of my body, through the process of reskinning and renaming blocks I have developed a deeper and more personal relationship to this space.”⁵

Inside the gallery, Haines placed images and accompanying poetic texts, selected to represent moments of desire throughout her transition. The texts were written in-game using the Minecraft book-editing interfaces—an experimental process that shaped the text and reading experience, with considerations for line-length and the need to “rewind” the book before returning it to the lectern. The first work she highlighted on her tour during the opening was Lesbian Wedding, a close-up wedding photo showing Haines (pre-transition) and her wife embracing. The pair look happy and intimate. As we looked at the photo, she read: “The first lesbian wedding I went to was my own, I just didn’t know it at the time.” One piece, the last on the tour, was enclosed by itself in a small room; this was partly a product of Haines’ desire to use the threshold as a transition point and partly because of the gallery’s need to comply with Twitch’s adult content rules (the transition point made it easier to keep potential nudity off of the public stream). The sign outside the door challenges the audience: “Stop! Read before continuing.” Haines goes on to explain, “doors present an interesting opportunity to define and delineate an audience, to challenge who can casually gaze upon a particular image or take up a particular space,” asking cis viewers to reflect on their motivations for entering. Inside the room is a selfie taken by the artist during recovery from bottom surgery—a moment, Haines says, where she reflected on Donna Haraway’s Cyborg Manifesto and “this idea that we can take agency around our body. And our body can be holy but our body can also be a construction—and our body is a construction regardless.” During the guided tour and after giving context for the piece, Haines invited us to enter, and most audience members did—which is a testament to Haines’ remarkable ability to hold the space open with great empathy and radical vulnerability.

A block’s throw from the cliffside vagina gallery was a collection of structures created by Haines throughout the duration of her residency. Among them: an image gallery dedicated to Haines’ canon of yonic art, an open-air roundtable, a residency centre—complete with an open bar and treasure chests full of cake, and an improbable floating ice rink. These sites served as gathering spaces for the numerous guests Haines hosted throughout her Ender tenure. Through her desire to explore Minecraft’s potential for queer and trans intimacies, Haines used these spaces for community expression, playing host to visiting artists, scholars, and musicians, as well as local queer community members through a partnership with Queen City Pride. As much as the exhibition expressed Haines’ experiences through its customized resources and large scale builds, (g)Ender Gallery emphasized Minecraft’s social potential through its commitment to create virtual space for the Regina queer community.

The second exhibition, Odanak—at the Village by Simon M. Benedict, was a series of interventions informed by the natural and built environments of the artist’s ancestral community of Odanak. Drawing from Kinaw8la—She Takes Care of You, an educational booklet co-authored by Evelyne Benedict, the artist’s sister, and Donna O’Bomsawin, an Odanak community elder, the exhibition extended the default Minecraft environment to incorporate medicinal plants—both native and non-native—currently present on Odanak Abenaki territory. These plants grew throughout the game world but were also planted by the artist next to a recreated digital version of the community’s Health Centre, where his sister cares for their physical counterparts.

Originally conceived during the open call in 2020, Benedict’s residency at Ender Gallery coincided with the discoveries of mass graves at many so-called residential schools. As a project dealing with Indigenous identity, the exhibition shifted in response to the ongoing national reckoning with the Canadian colonial system. Benedict expanded from the initial project proposal—which focussed on medicinal plants and the Health Centre—by adding several other buildings from the community that speak to its past, present, and future. These included: Kiuna College, a post-secondary institution in Odanak that works to “democratise access to post-secondary studies for First Nations members;”⁶ the Musée des Abénakis, the first Aboriginal museum located in Quebec in the former Catholic school of Odanak;⁷ and the St Francis Anglican Indian Mission, which is still operating as a church.⁸ Along with the Health Centre, these three buildings were positioned around a crossroads, where each offers a different vision of the community’s path forward and its relationship to its own history. The theme is also evoked in the project’s mix of historical and contemporary architectural styles, seen most noticeably in the Musée des Abénakis, where a modernist extension was added to the original building in 2005. Most of the interiors of the buildings are unfinished, with naturally-occurring streams from the game running under some floors and medicinal plants taking root spontaneously inside. The main exception to this is the Anglican Church, which Benedict details partially because it was the only building he was able to access internal photographs of, but also because of the building’s lineage and position as perhaps the least “reclaimed” by the Abenaki community itself.

The concept of home and our relationship to it was a recurring theme across the four exhibitions. For Benedict, this included the homes that confined us during lockdowns, the familial homes we were denied access to during pandemic restrictions, and, poignantly, the ancestral homes subjected to broader systemic barriers. One of the grounding elements of the exhibition was a large crossroad with paths leading to the different structures of the exhibition. One path—moss-covered cobblestone through grassland—was labelled “Home.” In a game-context, Home evokes the spawn area: where the player’s avatar instantiates. In Benedict’s work, the path “Home” led towards one of his first and most speculative buildings, a monumental green sphere that the visitor could climb to the top of and then fall into vertically, landing beside a computer workstation in the centre. The artist ended his exhibition tour with the audience in front of the workstation’s monitor, revealing a history of artistic experimentation with computers dating back to childhood. Odanak—at the Village took on the reconstruction of homes: the ancestral home, the online home, and speculative future home simultaneously.

The third Ender Gallery resident artist, Huidi Xiang, has a practice that uses video games to examine how gamplay can both obscure and overlap with labour. In the first year of the COVID-19 pandemic, she played the game Animal Crossing: New Horizons every day, meticulously cataloguing her actions in a Google spreadsheet. An MFA candidate at the time, Xiang recreated her physical art studio—which she was barred from due to pandemic safety protocols—within the confines of her Animal Crossing world. For her Ender Gallery project, How to Be an Artist in Minecraft, she continued with this methodology, eventually installing a monolithic version of the spreadsheet in the game world itself.

Continuing her interest in virtual representations of creativity and creative spaces, Xiang constructed multiple artist studios for herself in Minecraft. Included in this were references to her previous work in Animal Crossing⁹ —Xiang constructed two scaled models of her in-game studio as seen from both outside and inside, demonstrating the staggering difference of spatial representation in the game. Having studied architecture in her undergraduate years, Xiang uses these different geometries to highlight the ways digital space is free from the fidelity of physical architecture—traditional rationalities of space don’t apply.

As a game where near-infinite creativity is the basis for all further gameplay, Minecraft privileges the player-creator as a universal architect with complete control over their surroundings. This freedom has generated an impressive community of creatives and modders who use the platform to create their ideal worlds. As an artist working with these tools of infinite virtual creation, Xiang was interested in looking critically at the way the platform could disguise creative work as play. The depiction of non-player characters, or NPCs, as the game’s labour class further muddles any attempt at delineation. In Minecraft, NPCs are generated throughout the world as villagers: human-like characters that exist independent of the player. As with many popular video games, Minecraft’s NPCs are essential for unlocking elements of the game. What makes Minecraft distinct is how its NPCs function: as workers. A villager in Minecraft is most useful to a player as a sort of digital serf that can be tasked with any number of jobs, quickly providing the player with valuable resources. This dynamic places its users in a semantic struggle, torn between the exploitation of their workers and creative control of the universe. Despite this implicit hierarchy of “creativity above all else,” there are no “artists” among Minecraft’s village workers. Interrogating her position as an artist labourer in the Ender Gallery program, Xiang performed the role of the artist villager in Minecraft. By observing the behaviour and tools of village workers, Xiang created an “artist’s block”: a speculative game item that would enable other NPCs to become artist workers. Replete with pixelated spreadsheet and cursor, the artist’s block was displayed in the exhibition alongside the existing vocation blocks inside a dedicated virtual studio.

Further deconstructing the categories of art, work, and gameplay, Xiang’s final performance, Closing the Open Studio, involved demolishing the exhibition and restoring the map to its original layout. The performance reflected on acts of care and maintenance translated to a virtual space. Two weeks before the closing of her exhibition server, she systematically and silently walked through the exhibition, breaking block after block. Before beginning, she read from Hilary Sample’s Maintenance Architecture, beginning with this passage by Italo Calvino: “The fact is that street cleaners are welcomed like angels, and their task of removing the residue of yesterday’s existence is surrounded by a respectful silence, like a ritual that inspires devotion.”¹⁰

The fourth and final Ender Gallery exhibition was Chance Language Resource Pack by Travess Smalley. Though Smalley did construct an architecturally impressive home village for the gallery visitor to spawn in, the focus of his exhibition was the creation of a procedurally-generated texture pack for the game, which replaced the colour and pattern of every block with black and white images of text. Effectively, he transformed the game into a reading experience akin to concrete poetry. The outcome was at once, funny, surprising, and profound—from the falling water that cascaded “hehehe,” to underwater gardens of “ghosts,” to the portals to nether realms that beckoned with “imagine it.”

The textures are drawn from the game’s End Poem, written by Julian Gough and granted to the player upon defeat of the game’s most powerful mob, or enemy character, the Ender Dragon.¹¹ In Chance Language Resource Pack, the generative qualities of Minecraft are emphasised as the key to its creative potential; instead of painstakingly completing a prescribed narrative to achieve success, audiences are greeted with an expansive world where their own navigation creates its meaning.

During the exhibition opening tour, Smalley spoke about some of the precedents he sees for the work, both in computer-based art—for example Jon Conway’s Game of Life, where pixels evolve and die over an endless two-dimensional terrain, or JODI’s SOD, a mod of the game Wolfenstein3D that replaces all of the game textures with black and white images—and in art history, with the dadaists and beatniks. He read from Tristan Tzara’s instructions to make a dadaist poem written in 1920, describing a procedure to take a newspaper article, carefully cut out all the words and place them in a bag, shake gently, and arrange the poem in the order they fell out of the bag.¹² Besides the surprising textual juxtapositions Smalley’s version of Chance Language generated, we also observed spontaneous emergent behaviours the approach could generate when it interacted with other game systems. For example, because of the way game items are coloured, some items were not transformed fully into black and white text: the cat stayed red, the blue of the water persisted, the word “no” which textured a lilypad remained green. But when we triggered the weather of the game to make it rain, tiny letter “a”s fell from the sky.

In addition to dramatically rethinking the game’s experience, Smalley also re-staged a famous Minecraft performance, originally performed by user JL2579. The performance consisted of a seventeen day stream of a minecart ride towards “world border”: the farthest reaches of the game’s digital space.¹³ Smalley spoke about how JL2579’s performance was a key part of his introduction to Minecraft, and of how perceiving the endless but not repeating space of the game was integral to the exploration of procedural generation that would become so central to his ongoing practice (something he has been exploring both in and outside of Minecraft since 2014). In both the original version and Smalley’s homage, a minecart—an in-game cart item that can hold one player—rolls steadily along a straight track that is also being generated as it goes. The performance opened with a behind-the-scenes explanation of the visuals Smalley customised and the mechanisms that allowed the track to be continuously generated; then, the minecart departed, shifting the performance to a meditative, conversational space. The cart zoomed over the game’s vast landscapes, looking down on blocky trees, oceans, and mountains. The sky shifted from day to sunset to night and back to day. When a mountain reared before us, the code that generated the track allowed us to smoothly tunnel through. In A minecart ride towards world border, the grand scale of the terrain and our encounter with it was reminiscent of Xiang’s mismatched interior and exterior studio models: It evoked the contradiction between the almost-infinite game space and the computer that contains it.

Over the year of programming, which displayed a variety of exhibition themes, distinct commonalities emerged in how the artists approached their exhibitions. For example, all of the artists chose to make custom resource packs, changing the appearance and names of some or all of the game-items. As a result, we are releasing the Ender Gallery Resource Pack Pack, which contains the resource packs from all four exhibitions and can be downloaded and used throughout all versions of the game. Fundamentally, the experience of trying any of these resource packs on a different map with different buildings will be very different than visiting the exhibitions, with their specific and considered architecture—but we think it will offer its own moments of serendipity and reflection. Documentation of the exhibitions included standard practices like still photographs of installations and recorded video of performances, but the Resource Pack Pack is an attempt at a Minecraft-literate form of documentation. At the end of Ender Gallery’s inaugural year of programming, we are left with large digital files and perhaps an even bigger question: does the exhibition actually end at all?

For each of the exhibitions we hosted, we (and the artists) have a perfect digital replica which could easily be reinstalled, digitally distributed, and shared nearly infinitely. Each exhibition takes up less than 200 MB of disk storage. Every Minecraft map is the Borgesian map, to reference Jorge Luis Borges thought experiment in On Exactitude in Science, where he proposes a map with such level of detail it becomes the same size as the territory being mapped. We have chosen not to distribute these versions of the exhibitions in full fidelity, though the artists could choose to do so at any time, reactivating their exhibitions as living sites that could expand and create meaning through new audiences and players. The ‘end’ of Ender is self-imposed—as long as the world’s most popular game continues to be supported, the artist’s projects could continue to grow.

The imposition of endings within Minecraft was a shared theme within the Ender Gallery projects. Consider Xiang’s attempts to restore her world to its original layout to signify the end of her performance, or Smalley’s efforts towards reaching the end of his map. An “end” can be spatial, temporal, or narratological.

We further explored implied and intuited endings, edges, and borders in Minecraft in a series of events for the digital arts festivals MUTEK and Vector Festival (both 2021). Borrowing the form of Jane’s Walk, a series of neighbourhood walking tours named for writer and urbanist Jane Jacobs, we guided audiences through Minecraft villages and biomes—including one called “The End”—up to the edges of the world’s map, its physical boundary. Then, in a shift away from the most easily visible places of the game, we toured the actual server data, asking attendees to consider all of these as potential endings. Heavily inspired by Leonhard Müllner’s Operation Jane Walk (2018), a machinima film where the artist leads an architectural tour through the militaristic game environment of Tom Clancy’s: The Division,¹⁴ we invited attendees to join us in the game and talk about it as though it were a neighbourhood. In addition to the architecture of the in-game buildings, there is an “architecture” of the game mechanics, the terrain’s procedural generation, and behaviour of NPCs.

Another commonality amongst the exhibitions was the artist engagement around building a home base. This exploration of home became one of the core themes of Benedict’s Odanak—At the Village, but it was present in some form in all of the exhibitions. Of course, this is somewhat determined by Minecraft’s game play: survival mode necessitates building a house before nightfall. But in the context of Ender Gallery, there was no clear distinction between “studio” and “exhibition” spaces, and most of the artists chose to leave their first constructions standing for the full duration of their projects. Whether intentional or accidental, the effect of the live-work spaces existing within the exhibitions parallelled the pandemic experience for many who, out of necessity, allowed their homes to also become studios, offices, and galleries, all rolled into one. This is especially poignant when recalling Xiang’s exhibition and her interest in unpacking the relationship between games and work: the blurring of divisions between spaces of labour and leisure during work-from-home protocols echoes the tension Xiang highlights. There is something both more and less humane about working from home. During the pandemic, the difficulties of setting boundaries with professional obligations when working from home—as well as the perks of greater flexibility and globality—have been highly documented. However, it is perhaps not a coincidence that not one, but two babies were welcomed by Ender Gallery’s artists during our programming year.

While Minecraft offered artists flexibility and near-limitless space, the Ender Gallery program also faced challenges unique to the experience of hosting a residency and exhibition space in Minecraft. Despite a rich community of modders, hackers, and people who use the game to tell their own stories, Minecraft is proprietary: it can only be played by those with a paid account, which must be tied to a real email address. The Mackenzie Art Gallery purchased ten Minecraft accounts to be shared with interested audience members who didn’t have their own licences. While this was successful in increasing the accessibility of our programming, it proved to be an ongoing logistical challenge. Login attempts from new computers would prompt the sending of verification codes to curators’ emails and phones, requiring at least one person to manage the alerts and communicate with audiences. These activities would often be most prevalent at the beginnings of events, complicating key moments like the opening remarks of an exhibition livestream.

Moreover, even if audiences are familiar with Minecraft and have a personal account, different versions of the game are compatible with different hardware. There is the original Java Edition, which runs on laptop and desktop computers, but also the Bedrock Edition that runs on tablets and phones, not to mention the Nintendo version for the Nintendo Switch, Education version, etc. Ender Gallery used the Java Edition, because it offered the greatest configurability for hosting your own server; unfortunately, it’s incompatible with the other versions of the game. This meant that a user playing the Bedrock Edition could not join the exhibition—a laborious detail that frustrated everyone involved.

Even within the Java Edition, we had to constantly navigate updates and bug fixes, which occurred often and unpredictably during the exhibitions. In December 2021, the Log4J bug was discovered in a popular community library used in the Java programming language.¹⁵ Minecraft is written in the Java language and the bug could potentially lead to a player’s computer being compromised. As a result, the gallery had to be unexpectedly closed mid-exhibition while we reconciled software updates to secure the server.

Such administrative and accessibility issues are not unique to Minecraft, nor are they unique to artistic interventions in video games. Artists making work with video game engines are vulnerable to the peculiarities of the platform: its waxing and waning popularity, what integrations it does and doesn’t support, and potential corporate ownership and licensing changes. Artists making work for an app store or platform have a similar set of potential concerns and constraints: if the app store changes its conditions or the platform its algorithm, how does this affect the artist and their practice? There are precedents in analog art practices as well—a type of photographic film might stop being produced, a paint manufacturer might change their formula. This all raises the question of how far anxiety about the longevity of tools can be taken. But with digital media, these foundational changes can shift at scales unprecedented within traditional material production. The uncertainty of our relationship to the platform—and by extension, Microsoft—was a primary consideration throughout the Ender Gallery program.

Artists creating and exhibiting work through digital media have been navigating these power imbalances for years, though often on the sidelines of the larger contemporary art discourse. The shift towards digital media, incited by pandemic gallery closures, brought these concerns to a broader audience, sometimes for the first time. Participating in online exhibitions in the spring of 2020 was a disorienting experience for artists already working in computational art media. It felt like the art world had stumbled into our secret clubhouse, proclaiming they had built it themselves. But we sensed there was also an opportunity to explore what a digital exhibition could really offer. The gallery experience that has come to dominate physical exhibitions—white cubes, clasped hands, quiet rooms—translates poorly to digital space. No longer confined to a discrete embodied experience, the digital exhibition competes for its audience’s attention against their two dozen tabs. Experiences heavily reliant on full sensory and spatial awareness crumble when the notification to enable audio is missed.

Moving beyond the skeuomorphism of the virtual white cube populated by JPGs, digital exhibitions can explore the intangible spaces that have emerged in this new era. Ender Gallery explored some of these potential affordances: in terms of scale of exhibitions; in terms of the intimacy of the home encounter; and in terms of expanded ideas about what studios, exhibitions, and documentation can be. Traversing the space between pandemic-inspired online gallery and more recent metaverse interest, Ender Gallery offers a model for future artist engagement with games and experimental online spaces through the exploration and expansion of these worlds. The role of the digital exhibition is not to imitate its physical counterpart. Digital art and its exhibitions exist to examine the affordances of their endemic space.

Visit the Ender Gallery to access the Ender Gallery Resource Pack Pack.

Cat Bluemke is an artist working with game design, performance, and expanded reality. Often working through collaboration with Jonathan Carroll 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. Her practice has been featured in Hyperallergic, Canadian Art, 032c, the National Post, and Blackflash and Our Times magazines. She has received funding from Rhizome, the Canada Council for the Arts, and provincial and municipal arts councils.

Since 2019 she has worked for the MacKenzie Art Gallery in Regina, SK, Treaty 4 Territory. Through the gallery she has spearheaded several digital arts programs, including co-curating the Minecraft-based artist residency Ender Gallery. Currently, she is developing their Digital Exhibitions Toolkit project through a Canada Council for the Arts Digital Strategy Fund grant.

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.

Sarah Friend is an artist and software developer specializing in blockchain, games, and the p2p web. She is a participant in the Berlin Program for Artists, a co-curator of Ender Gallery, an artist residency taking place inside the game Minecraft, an alumni of Recurse Centre, a retreat for programmers, and an organiser of Our Networks, a conference on all aspects of the distributed web. Recent solo exhibitions include Off: Endgame, curated by Rhizome, Refraction and Fingerprints at Public Works Administration, New York, USA and Terraforming at Galerie Nagel Draxler in Berlin, Germany.

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