Whitney Biennial 2017

Floor 6

Born 1987
Lives in Oakland, CA

Relying almost entirely on the written word, Porpentine Charity Heartscape creates web-based games that build fantastic and frightening worlds a player must navigate by making choices. Heartscape employs popular genres and narrative tropes to examine power dynamics and conflicting feelings of dignity and shame, at times directly challenging or frustrating the player.

In With Those We Love Alive, the player is an inventor who must recover from childhood trauma while performing tasks for a monstrous empress. The player is sometimes prompted to take action in the real world—to literally draw occult signs on her skin representing her feelings during the game, for instance.

In howling dogs, the player is alone in a metal cell. Days pass, punctuated only by meals, sleep, and periodic withdrawals into virtual reality, worlds within the world of the game that summon both the pleasure and the danger of escapism.