MEET ISLA HANSEN: UCLA GAME LAB ARTIST IN RESIDENCE
The UCLA Game Lab profiled this year's artist in residence, Isla Hansen
"Artist Isla Hansen strives to create interactive media works that are as inviting as possible—even irresistible, as one of her pieces at November’s UCLA Game Art Festival proved. Titled Long Reliever, the sculpture uses a Nintendo Wiimote affixed to a moving armature that replicates the rudimentary motions of an endless game of Wii baseball. Essentially, Hansen built a machine to play itself. But that didn’t stop festival attendees from trying to get involved.
“People wanted to play that like a game, but it wasn’t that kind of work,” Hansen said. “They eventually broke it!”
Such compelling approachability is a hallmark of Hansen’s work, which mixes interactive technologies with the participant’s own body to re-enact forms of popular media, play, and industrial systems of production. Hansen, a New York-based artist, received her MFA in 2015 at Carnegie Mellon University and was awarded a 2015 Dedalus Foundation fellowship. She has spent this past fall in the UCLA Game Lab as an Artist in Residence, a program that promotes in-depth exchanges between UCLA-based game-makers and visiting artists."— David O'Grady, December 21, 2015
Read the full article at the UCLA Game Lab's website.