Peter Sheehan is next up in our Senior Spotlight!
Briefly describe your artistic practice.
My drive to make work comes out of thinking about how my performances and visual language fit within games. Games are very flexible representations of the complex social relationships we have with one another. I love to recontextualize actions and phrases into play, especially when they could easily become serious if the magic circle were broken.
What are you currently working on?
The next project is going to start once school’s over— my sister is a stats major home from NYU, and from her I learned about the Stackleberg model, which is that the first corporation to go to market dominates the market. Hopefully, I make something that is a more exciting, venomous version of Monopoly, kept track of with Arduino boards and LCD screens. Lizzie Magie used Monopoly to teach about the perils of land grabbing and taxation, so I’d love to get people used to systems thinking, to understand why businesses exploit their labor forces.
How has your artistic practice changed since you started working entirely from home?
Working from home really upended the teatable for me. I had a plan for everything. Now, I’m re-adapting and trying to stay positive, focusing on making new games and work for younger audiences, being that I’ve got some very intelligent younger siblings who I can design with.
