Anisha Baid MFA ’24 received a grant from the India Foundation for the Arts for 2022. With this grant, she will create a video game that investigates expressions of corporate culture and gendered labor as manifested on the computer interface.
Baid’s project is inspired by the genre of ‘Fumblecore’ games, which construct gameplay by inducing unintuitive game mechanics and bodily controls between the player and the game characters. These games defamiliarize the body as one expects it to be represented on the screen, as well as the ways one expects to control these representations through the physical body itself. In this project, Anisha will create a browser-based video game that will displace the user’s consciousness into that of a computer. Using a set of very simple game mechanics, the game will induce a poetic and reflective state of activating the machine and being on the computer interface, thereby countering the almost automatic response that commercial interface design is teaching us, conditioning us with.