Try your best to get to the very top of the bottom of the corporate ladder in Tough Guy Mountain’s new interactive narrative game.
Cat Bluemke
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. [www.catbluemke.com]
Nine artists share responses to prompts that aim to interrogate and help situate digital arts practice.
Cat Bluemke responds to questions posed through the Working Title: Digital Art Curriculum with a digital comic.
Alongside the launch of the Ender Gallery Resource Pack Pack, curators Sarah Friend, Cat Bluemke, and Jonathan Carroll reflect on Ender Gallery: an exhibition space and artist residency that took place within the game Minecraft.
Tough Guy Mountain’s emulation of start-up culture and techno-solutionism promote the compatibility in ideals between workers in art and technology.