Net artist and independent game designer
Nathalie Lawhead is an independent net artist and video game designer residing in Irvine, California.
Life and career.
Lawhead's background is in net art. Their work often invokes the iconography of 1990s-era web design and computing, particularly moments of technical failure, including pixelated lo-fi imagery, glitches, pop-up ads, and error messages. Lawhead's "Tetrageddon Games" is a compilation of short experimental games that playfully subvert norms of taste in web and game aesthetics. Their 2017 project "Everything is Going to Be OK" was described by Lawhead as an "interactive zine," and combines short poems, games, and animations to express personal experiences with trauma.
Early work.
Lawhead's career started as far back as the mid-to-late nineties, with various pieces of net-art and poetry, culminating in the release of "Blue Suburbia" in 1999, a project created in collaboration with their mother, Milena Lawhead. Their work often existed in a middleground, adopting various elements from trends in circles that used Adobe Flash, whilst still retaining an HTML focus common with many net-artists, eventually having their work described colloquially as 'games' by critics online. Lawhead's early work has since mostly been lost, due to the ongoing issues with inaccessibility and website death caused by changing technologies, imperfect archival materials, and the removal of support for certain programs such as Flash on the larger internet. This history of ephemeral projects has continued to inspire their current body of work, which often adopts motifs of digital graveyards, anarchic technology, and the fleeting nature of artistic existence on the internet.
Harassment.
Lawhead was subjected to online and offline abuse and harassment following their discussion of their game "Everything is Going to Be OK" at Double Fine's Day of the Devs event, which increased after they published an article, "YouTube Culture is Turning Kids Against Art Games", on Venture Beat, where they discussed experiences with harassment. As a result, Lawhead further revised and expanded "Everything is Going to Be OK" to include these experiences and comment on how gaming culture, and culture in general, enables abusers.
In 2019, Lawhead went public with rape allegations against video game composer Jeremy Soule.
MoMA induction.
Following the release of "Everything is Going to Be OK", the title was included in the Museum of Modern Art's 2022 exhibition "Never Alone: Video Games as Interactive Design," an exhibit that included a series of 35 different works spanning the development of video games as an art form"," and exploring their validity as works of design art. Lawhead's work was eventually inducted into the museum's permanent collection following the exhibition, making the MoMA the first major artistic institution to include Lawhead's game in their catalogue.
References.
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