Center for Science and the Imagination | CSI Skill Tree: Kentucky Route Zero with Zoyander Street and Rachel Carr @imagineASU | Uploaded August 2021 | Updated October 2024, 1 hour ago.
CSI Skill Tree is a series that examines and celebrates how video games envision possible futures, build rich and thought-provoking worlds, and engage people as active participants in unfolding and interpreting stories. In this episode, we take a close look at "Kentucky Route Zero," a magical realist adventure game about a secret, paranormal highway running through the caves beneath Kentucky. The game was released in five acts between 2013 and 2020. It was developed by Cardboard Computer and published by Annapurna Interactive.
About our special guests:
Zoyander Street is an artist-researcher and critic working at the fringes of indie video games for more than a decade. Their practice focuses on video games, but also involves other forms of media art and (mis)uses of technology. Led by ethnographic and historical research, they create lo-fi glitchy games and custom hardware for festivals, galleries, and museums, using interaction design to harness the expressive potential of audience participation. They are a neurodivergent, genderqueer trans man living in South Yorkshire, in the country currently known as the United Kingdom. They are on the boards of NEoN Digital Arts and Critical Distance, and are a PhD student in Sociology at Lancaster University. Learn more at https://zoyander.cc.
Rachel Carr is an assistant professor of English and the program coordinator for Women's and Gender Studies at Lindsey Wilson College. She earned her Ph.D. in English and a graduate certificate in Women's and Gender Studies from the University of Kentucky in 2019. Before coming to Lindsey Wilson, she was an assistant writing program administrator at the University of Kentucky. Her current research project, “But What Has Helga Crane to Do with the West Indies? Plantation Afterlives in the Black Atlantic,” explores how Modernist Literature reckons with the plantation system’s impact on the natural world.
About the Center for Science and the Imagination:
The Center for Science and the Imagination at Arizona State University engages in research, outreach and radical collaborations to reinvent our relationship with the future. From writers, artists, and teachers to scientists, engineers, and technologists, we bring diverse intellectual practices together to create visions of the future that are inspiring, inclusive, and imaginative. Learn more at https://csi.asu.edu.
CSI Skill Tree is a series that examines and celebrates how video games envision possible futures, build rich and thought-provoking worlds, and engage people as active participants in unfolding and interpreting stories. In this episode, we take a close look at "Kentucky Route Zero," a magical realist adventure game about a secret, paranormal highway running through the caves beneath Kentucky. The game was released in five acts between 2013 and 2020. It was developed by Cardboard Computer and published by Annapurna Interactive.
About our special guests:
Zoyander Street is an artist-researcher and critic working at the fringes of indie video games for more than a decade. Their practice focuses on video games, but also involves other forms of media art and (mis)uses of technology. Led by ethnographic and historical research, they create lo-fi glitchy games and custom hardware for festivals, galleries, and museums, using interaction design to harness the expressive potential of audience participation. They are a neurodivergent, genderqueer trans man living in South Yorkshire, in the country currently known as the United Kingdom. They are on the boards of NEoN Digital Arts and Critical Distance, and are a PhD student in Sociology at Lancaster University. Learn more at https://zoyander.cc.
Rachel Carr is an assistant professor of English and the program coordinator for Women's and Gender Studies at Lindsey Wilson College. She earned her Ph.D. in English and a graduate certificate in Women's and Gender Studies from the University of Kentucky in 2019. Before coming to Lindsey Wilson, she was an assistant writing program administrator at the University of Kentucky. Her current research project, “But What Has Helga Crane to Do with the West Indies? Plantation Afterlives in the Black Atlantic,” explores how Modernist Literature reckons with the plantation system’s impact on the natural world.
About the Center for Science and the Imagination:
The Center for Science and the Imagination at Arizona State University engages in research, outreach and radical collaborations to reinvent our relationship with the future. From writers, artists, and teachers to scientists, engineers, and technologists, we bring diverse intellectual practices together to create visions of the future that are inspiring, inclusive, and imaginative. Learn more at https://csi.asu.edu.
