A Game Takes You Into Deep Dreaming

‘Black Room’ is a surreal ‘feminist dungeon crawler’ from LA-based artist Cassie McQuater. The work is a meditation on the web browser, presented as a series of dream-like mythologies that recontextualize hyper-sexualized female video game character sprites. McQuater’s compositions in ‘Black Room’ create a place of calm on the internet, a highly personal work reflecting the artist’s struggle with insomnia and anxiety.

The artwork is free to play online, and meant to be played over and over. McQuater’s darkly utopian compositions are best when explored in the browser, and the game is constantly growing.

You play as an insomniac on the verge of sleep, continually returning to the Black Room, a meditation technique your mother taught you for falling asleep, visualizing black flowers in a black vase on a black table in the center of a black room.

TRANSFER is pleased to release the first series of video works available for collection from Black Room. McQuater performs select levels as single-channel video, designed to loop seamlessly, forever meandering through each level. Each work is an edition 1 + 1AP, making collectors the unique owner of a page in the online game.

You can play the game online via itch.io. Black Room was a GDC/IGF 2019 Nuovo Award winning game.

ABOUT THE ARTIST///

Cassie McQuater (b. 1987 Detroit, MI) is a new media and videogame artist working in Los Angeles. Her practice involves hours of surfing the net, mining for digital artifacts, and repurposing them as a way to reflect on and reinvent our relationship with interactive storytelling. Recently, her work has been shown as part of TRANSFER Gallery’s The Download, won the 2019 IGF Nuovo Award, the 2019 Rhizome microgrant, was nominated for the 2018 New Media Writing Prize & 2018 AMAZE Berlin Award.

VISIT THE EXHIBITION ///

You can visit the gallery in DTLA on Thursday, Friday and Saturday from 2-7PM – and play the artwork online anytime.

TRANSFER LA
1000 S Hope Street
Dial TRANSFER in the buzzer, 4th Floor
Thursday, Friday, Saturday 2-7PM from September 12 – November 7