“Playing a game is the voluntary attempt to overcome unnecessary obstacles.”
Bernard Suits from his 1978 book The Grasshopper: Games, Life and Utopia

Over the last several years, I’ve been teaching experimental computer games classes to both art and non art students at a few universities. On a weekly basis, we play, discuss and make games using some basic programming. My focus is similar to any studio class, encouraging students to let loose with the medium and in the process express themselves and whatever is on their mind. The games we make tend to be simple yet unexpectedly existential – first person cameras that roam blocky, geometric landscapes collecting pointless items, opening an infinite amount of doors and interacting with faceless characters. Time and time again, I have found myself moved by students’ games that are able to address topics such as trouble at home or personal anxiety using deceptively simple means. But the most memorable experience from these classes has been watching students present – and play – their own games in front of the class. If their games are introspective mirrors, playing through them is a way of inhabiting and cathartically owning them (at least this is what some of the students have told me). Needless to say, these classes have left an impression on me.

The Bernard Suits quote listed above is something we discuss early on. Being able to temporarily construct and inhabit a space where you have absolute agency, however constrained, can be incredibly empowering in a world that often feels outside of your control. This is analogous to my own personal relationship to art-making (as a personal hobby, not necessarily as a public practice). I first started making art as a way to cope with issues surrounding my health. Then it became my home as I moved to new countries. And recently, as I’ve spent a lot of my time teaching, I have found it in my curriculum. For example, when introducing a new tool or concept , I share a mini-game that I built using only that tool. These games are usually very simple, or absurdly impossible, in order to demonstrate a possible extremity. This was the start of my “pedagogical games”, and the starting point of this exhibition.

Agents and Boundaries, the current  exhibition at 427, evolved to encompass several overlapping themes. The first comes from one of my mini-games, which covered navigation for AI “bots” and collision detection between objects. The name of that week’s class was Agents and Boundaries, which is where the exhibition title came from. I decided the mini-game was odd enough to take out of context and stage an exhibition around, so I expanded it to take place in a virtual version of the 427 gallery. Its goal is to respond to spatial prompts while traversing several labyrinths at once. In the exhibition, the game is presented on a computer terminal that is mirrored to a projector, recreating the classroom dynamic including the awkward, uneven lighting. It can be interpreted as navigating invisible constructs, such as social relationships, national identities and societal norms.

Growing up in Riga speaking both Latvian and Russian languages, my Latvian language was halted when me and my family immigrated to America. Once my grandfather, who always encouraged my Latvian identity, passed away, so too did my closest link to the language. When I made my way back to Riga as an adult, I found myself wanting to blend in. Only recently have I accepted that this will never be the case and that my fractured identities are very common and something I can embrace. This mixing of languages inspired my ongoing work that is a mutating alphabet. The version made for this exhibition takes the first four letters of the Roman alphabet and systematically scrambles them indefinitely. Sometimes new letter-like formations are created; other times, the chimeric foreign characters are pure nonsense.

The gallery radiator is extended to surround the perimeter of the gallery, creating an illusion of a cradle-like enclosure for the visitor, shrinking them to the size of a child. This effect is compounded by the room-sized projector screen and oversized mural of a window. Taken together with the classroom decor, this play with scale is intended to flip the pedagogical dynamic – adults are the children here, left to play with its logic.