The UC Santa Cruz Digital Arts and New Media M.F.A. program presents a two-person show featuring interactive works created by artists Evie Chang and Marjan Khatibi.
Evie Chang is an interdisciplinary multimedia artist who aims to make interesting, evocative, and beautiful work out of anything (physical or otherwise) she can bend to her will. Evie presents "Buddytale," a game exploring our attachments to virtual pets and the nature of our relationships to them. The game invites players pick out and care for their own virtual buddy and play through snapshots of their life together: their first meeting, picking out a toy at the pet shop, comforting them during a particularly bad storm, and so on, until they must say goodbye.
Marjan Khatibi is an illustrator and visual designer from Tehran, Iran. She is a full scholar and an honors graduate from the Art University of Tehran where she received her M.A. in Graphic Design. Her illustrations are meant to provoke emotion and inspire conversation with her audience. She started her practice as a media artist at UCSC, and she fights for achieving gender equality, especially in her home country. Marjan's project, "Virtual Empowerment," critiques the patriarchal conditions of contemporary Iran by contrasting them with a narrative of powerful female figures from Persian mythology.
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FREE and open to the public
View online between Dec 4, 2020–Apr 1, 2021
image credit: Khatibi, Marjan. Virtual Empowerment (cropped) 2020. Screenshot from immersive virtual reality experience and installation. Digital Arts and New Media program, Division of the Arts, University of California, Santa Cruz.