Tell us a bit about who you are and what you do.

I am an artist, designer, and educator that works with and teaches sculpture and fabrication, video production, and (video)game design. I love dancing and rock climbing, but I’m good at neither.

How did your interest in your work begin?

I think I’ve always been interested in systems: how we find our way into them, how we become literate in them. Whether a machine, a map, or a string of words, systems teach us or shut us out, and in either case shape how we interact with the world. Back when I was just a kid moving from Texas to New York City, I was wowed by the shared infrastructure of the subway. I soon learned more about how the world was fabricated from the technicians at the Cooper Union sculpture shop. Moving back to Texas I developed a relationship to care while I learned to program and operate big computer controlled milling machines, began teaching, and gathered friends for dinner parties. My time in Virginia, during my MFA, was shaped by a global pandemic. It was there, in isolation, that I discovered videogames and walks in the woods during a time I had imagined would be spent staying up late with friends in another sculpture shop. I think I learned a lot about what a practice could be and where I did and didn’t fit into existing systems. My work is always changing, always growing, and often folds back upon itself.

What prompted your shift in focus from studio practice to game design and cultural organizing? 

The throughline between putting on exhibitions and making games has become more clear to me only in the last year. I love gathering my friends in a yard or under a roof, feeding them, and giving them the means to entangle themselves, and their practices, with one another. That sounds like I am running some kind of underground fight club. But the most exciting and healing projects have been those between friends. My academic study of games often focuses on and critiques the radical individualism they foster and champion, and the precarity that follows for those steeped in gamic logic. But I believe games, especially ones played in a room together, can be challenging, emotional, revelatory. They can build solidarity. They might even be fun.

What do video games offer you over other mediums and approaches?

To be fair, videogames have achieved, for me, that shopping list from a moment ago.

Videogames have brought me to tears. Kept me up at night. They have changed how my brain works. None of what I just said is inherently positive or negative. It is a powerful medium.

Videogames get inside you, much like a job might. They teach your hands and train your attention, they can absorb you. But these are designed systems with their own goals.

The same design that could move you to experience curiosity or loss or outrage could also be good at keeping you playing past pleasure or consent.

Because of the platforms that host them and the capital that supports their development and distribution, many games do not focus on those positively transformative things. So videogames often train us to accept this absorption, holding us in a frictionless engagement with tasks and normalizing the misrecognition of endurance for agency.

Games and even videogames are not inherently insidious. They are opportunities to share, question, build and break things together. And they don’t have to be played with others to do this: even alone, you’re entangled with whoever built the system, and with the system itself. There are enough developers of analog and digital games working against the grain of the market that maintain optimism in the medium for me.

How do you see your work evolving in parallel to things that are going on around you right now?

Oh brother, I don’t know. The world is once again literally on fire as I write this. Tomorrow I’m hosting a tabletop roleplaying game for a bunch of artists. I’ve made the character sheets, and maps, and snacks, and we’ll play make-believe for an afternoon, sheltered indoors beside some box filters I built earlier this year to protect a different group of friends from a different harmful air. None of that is the game I designed. It’s just what I know I can bring so the game can happen. I know how this sounds. I can’t claim any of it changes a material world that feels more and more perilous. But making things that help people gather and play is most of what I know how to do, and it seems to matter more, not less.

Ye Father What Flee to Their Cabins | 2025 | Unreal Engine, PC, mouse | r/t 1:28

What is your favourite part of being an educator?

I love seeing people reach to build what they sketch, make something happen, figure something out. I’m so uninterested in ownership of that moment. But it’s one of the best feelings: to problem solve with someone, to soften their stumbles, to hand them a tool, for them to make something I never could!

Who are some artists/creatives that you would like to collaborate with in an ideal world?

Laurie Anderson, wow she is the real deal. An artist who respects everyone on her team. An artist curious about the material of her work, intellectually, corporeally. 

I would love to collaborate with all of my friends.

What led to the birth of Moonmist? Has there been any important lessons learned throughout its history?

I was living in Houston and had a yard with a shed. It feels passé now to imagine a backyard shed as a novel context for hosting art, but it was 2018 and it was VERY cool. My dear friend and incredible interdisciplinary artist Shana Hoehn and I wanted to see more experimental work hosted in an intentional way, so we invited our friends from around Texas to set up in my backyard. My friend Austin Weber, who is now getting a PhD in food science, cooked an incredible spread for the opening. It was a weird and good show! And it set a no-holds-barred precedent: the architecture wasn’t just mutable, it got mutated by the work. We could do whatever we wanted to that house. That hooked me, and the model stuck. It grew to include artists from across the country and world, but always with an emphasis on branching from the local. And the food got more and more ambitious with each show.

Our last show was organized during 2020, after I had moved to Virginia, far from the original Moonmist address. I rebuilt that backyard from memory in Blender and Unreal Engine, populated it with works by artists curated by Aryel René Jackson, and hosted it as an online 3D simulation accessible via web browser. Meeting with the participating artists as we “installed” their work was such a joy. We suddenly had an infinite material and fabrication budget. We could dig a hole here or double the size of something there. What we couldn’t do was feed anyone at the show.

Still, that opening in August 2020 was maybe the most lively Zoom meeting I have ever attended. I think the most important thing about Moonmist is the context and the place. It has always been about sharing space and building something together there, whether swampy gulf-coast summer, a rare Texas freeze, or through our little digital windows.

It’s taken me six years to regroup and understand more about how I could keep serving that project: if the place is something we build together, then building the place is the show. Moonmist is reincarnating as some form of that: a project about playing and worldbuilding with artists. Inviting artists into games is much like handing them that house and that yard: a world open to their curiosity and intervention.

Moonmist in Unreal Engine in 2020.

Who are the artists/musicians/creatives that have been inspiring or interesting to you lately?

I’ve been listening to the folk band Watchhouse over the last year. The first time I heard one of their songs, I played it on repeat while driving through country roads upstate at dusk, looking for a certain farm, and trying to learn the words and melody. I was so absorbed I drove my car into a ditch later that evening and needed to ask a man with a tractor to pull me out. I mailed him a pecan pie. Andrew Marlin and Emily Frantz are extraordinary lyricists. They weave a kind of quiet that gets under your skin.

Similarly, the folks at Dropout have changed my sense of what making work together can look like: they’ve built something genuinely cooperative and strange inside an industry that does not often reward things of unusual shapes. Brennan Lee Mulligan’s work, especially, introduced me to tabletop roleplaying games in a way I hadn’t had access to before. He builds worlds where the stakes are absurd, but also materially and politically real for the characters (and players!) living inside them. I think both Watchhouse and Dropout are both good at their craft and still unafraid to speak their minds from within the very forms and industries that could have flattened them.

Are there any areas, techniques, or materials that you’re interested in exploring further in your work?

For the first time in my life I am feeling pressure to take the craft of filmmaking seriously. Not just how to shoot log footage and mix audio, but how to work with people on camera. Working with human subjects, ethically while telling a story, is such an impressive skill to me whether you are a documentary filmmaker or doing ethnographic fieldwork.

What is something you’ve always wanted to do and are working towards achieving?

When I was four I told my mom I wanted to design firework shows. That hasn’t worked out, and I’ve maybe grown suspicious of that kind of spectacle and its trappings. But I really do believe in the power of the spectacular; I think what I loved at four wasn’t the explosions, it was everyone looking up at the same sky. We need that more than ever. Generative AI can scratch the itch of wonder, but it’s wonder without anybody on the other end of it. And I fear that wonder will grow so personalized, so siloed, that our neighbors’ wonder will become unrecognizable, even distasteful such that we may forget the sky we share. I can’t believe I’m championing spectacle in an era of attention economy and brain rot, but hear me out: we need humans and their dreams, their grandmothers’ dreams, their grandsons’ dreams, coming together to make new, stupid, loud, moving, fearless things. Lately I’m finding the intention set by a group in a tabletop role playing game and the immersion in a beautiful and strange gameworld might be my version of the firework show. A sky we can wonder at together.

Any upcoming projects?

The new Moonmist, mostly (I have a dissertation in the works). Its new website will serve as an archive of past exhibitions and document of the rules and artifacts of the games we will develop and play moving forward. We’re also launching a YouTube channel of “actual play” series: episodes of tabletop roleplaying games, starting with two-player roleplaying and worldbuilding games. Then comes “Glitch and Gospel,” a game of my design, played over the course of a week between a group of artist friends at EMPAC in Troy, NY. By the time it’s released this fall as an episodic video series and a printed rulebook, I’ll have spent almost eighteen months on Glitch and Gospel.

What do you collect?

I used to collect measuring (metrology) tools, never particularly nice ones, but beautiful and precise: micrometers, protractors, straight edges, dial indicators.

Today I collect song lyrics, skills, and magic abilities.

Interviewed by Seth Nguyen. Artist portrait by Logan West.