For our first installment of Artfully Bound, I interviewed Juno Morrow who is a photographer, multidisciplinary artist, designer, and educator. Their recent book of photography is called “After Dark”. I got to ask Juno some questions about art, photography, and their involvement with video game design.
Uzomah: Can you describe how you used light, and incorporated the concept of time in your latest book “ After dark”?
Juno: The night has always been when I feel most alive and when the world feels most intriguing. There’s some kind of mystique to the night and darkness that I’ve always found irresistible. And so, I decided to explore this feeling in after dark. I had the idea of making a photography book that takes place in different places over the course of the night, not in a linear fashion as in this was taken at 8:04pm on 2/12/2020 followed by one taken at 8:05pm 2/12/2020, 6am 2/13/2020, etc., but instead taken across various nights within sequential hours, so like a photo at 5pm in Stockholm in 2012 followed by one at 5:01pm from Brooklyn in 2015, etc. all the way through the night, until dawn. I wanted to better understand this aesthetic of night and what happens across time.
U: What do you aim for as an educator in your teaching style? What do you want students to take away from your course?
J: I’d say my teaching style is pretty eclectic with hyper-structured classes with every minute planned and total freeform ones in which we find ourselves watching cat videos and discussing feelings of alienation and trauma. I hope my students walk away with the following:
- An unusual perspective on things.
2. Resourcefulness is an essential creative skill, realizing that distant ideas can be within reach when you stay focused propelling yourself forward.
3. Making stuff for its own sake. Worry about the rest afterward.
U: How did you get into game design?
J: It was really an accident. I’ve always liked games but didn’t really consider myself a game-person. I enrolled in the Design & Technology Program at Parsons School of Design, which is a unique inter/multidisciplinary new media/interaction design-y program/madhouse. I found myself getting really excited to make new worlds and express abstract concepts and structures. A lot of my projects would start off as interactive art projects that borrowed a lot of visual language and interaction paradigms from games. At some point along the way, I started making more conventional games with novel premises and mechanics.
U: What were some of the video games that stand out that made you want to design games?
J: My single biggest game design inspiration would have to be QWOP by Bennett Foddy. QWOP is a track and field race browser game in which the player uses four keys to control distinct muscle groups (Q for left thigh, W for right thigh, O for left calf, and P for right calf). The player has to move forward in the race without falling over. It takes what should be an intuitive act — running forward — and makes it frustratingly hard. First-time players are left flabbergasted by the difficulty, struggling to stay upright and make it further than a meter or two down the field. I really love weird games like this that give you an absurd task, allowing you to stop and reflect on them.
I also find myself inspired by bizarre stuff like Dujanah by Jack Spinoza, Hylics by Mason Lindroth, and Bratavism by Marina Kittaka.
U: What type of camera do you use?
J: When traveling or whenever I know I’m going to use my camera, I usually use my Nikon D800 with lenses that allow me to capture a very shallow depth of field or my Sony RX1R II, which is a lot more compact. For casual everyday stuff, I just use my Samsung Galaxy S10.
U: Your art has a very heavy backdrop of existential and ontological themes in every medium you chose. How can you use that to address issues concerning LGBTQIA and QTPOC so that they are better understood?
J: A lot of my work is steeped in searching for identity and meaning. I’m really interested in perception and subjective experience too — how we exist in the world and our relationship to society. When we feel othered by society, we need to make sense of how we fit into the world. Conspiracy Theories About Myself is a game in which you have to make it home from the laundromat without making eye contact with strangers to avoid crying. It’s autobiographical, from an awkward experience I had meeting a student in the street who I hadn’t seen since before I transitioned. I couldn’t stop feeling an overwhelming sense of shame despite nothing bad happening during the encounter.
Lately, I’ve been working on Marginalia, a photo memoir that really examines my personal experiences with race, gender and marginalization using the same lens. It’s coming out this summer from CLASH Books (shameless plug :).
U: How important has the visual arts been in finding your voice as someone who identifies as LGBTQIA?
J: Art has been a really fundamental coping mechanism for me, especially as a neurotic queer trans person. Being able to pour out all of your fears, insecurities, and questions of the world into something creative is huge. It also helps build a community with other LGBTQIA folks who connect with my work.
U: How did the game Blood Broker come about? How can future gamers take the lead and use gaming and virtual reality to address social issues such as democracy, peer pressure, and propaganda? What are some life lessons you have learned from doing art?
J: Blood Broker’s a funny one, because the original idea was inspired by a twitter bot (weird game ideas bot @yournextgame). The tweet was “comedy cookie clicker-like about nefarious demigods.” In Cookie Clicker, you click on a cookie to bake a cookie, which leads to endless clicking in search of more and more cookies. It’s ridiculous and incredibly addictive.
For Blood Broker, since I have a terribly dark sense of humor, I had the idea of clicking to sacrifice a human, something that a nefarious demigod might do. Human sacrifice performed by humans on their own people seems like such an absurd notion within our choice-valuing society. And yet those in power regularly convince people to go to war and vote against their own interests. So I imagined a world in which people were sold on the idea of human sacrifice, where economic resources and social engineering could be used to bring people to fight over who would be sacrificed first. It’s perverse, much like our society.
I think the biggest thing gamers can do is propagate those games featuring this type of subject-matter that is already out there — games like Papers, Please, and This War of Mine. In the last decade, games as a popular medium have really opened up to possibilities beyond entertainment. I’d love to see more of this.
U: How do the arts help one represent oneself?
J: Art can be used to not only deeply represent our complex ideas and feelings, but also to communicate those to others, allowing for deeper connections. Beauty is a language of its own, not just in the visual sense, but also in the visceral sense of wonder that makes us want to understand something consciously and/or subconsciously. That’s incredibly powerful.
U: What projects are you currently working on?
J: In addition to Marginalia, which I mentioned earlier, I’m still trying to wrap up Pruuds vs. Sloots, which is a derpy competitive multiplayer game I’ve been making with my partner, Gabriel. You play as weird characters like two legged-horses, soup dumplings and mangos trying to convert the other characters to your team’s side (pruuds or sloots). Everything features MSPaint-style graphics, so it’s stunningly beautiful (lol). There’s absolutely nothing serious about it, which is a lot of fun.
You can find more about their work here.
