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 in 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 other early work has mostly been lost, due to the ongoing issues with inaccessibility and website death caused by changing technologies, imperfect archiving, 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.
Notable works
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|
| 1999 | Blue Suburbia | An interactive website consisting of labyrinthine nested pages filled with works of poetry and visual arts, blending various artistic mediums into a single coherent webpage, made in conjunction with Milena Lawhead. |
| 2016 | Tetrageddon Games | Lawhead's collection of short, humorous, and experimental games which draw on the aesthetics of the early internet. |
| 2017 | Everything is Going to Be OK | Lawhead's digital zine, which features a series of short interactive and animated vignettes confronting issues of struggle, power, and abuse with anarchic humor. |
| 2018 | A_DESKTOP_LOVE_STORY | A brief narrative told within a file system, where one file has a crush on another file, and the user is tasked with navigating directories and files in the operating system to facilitate their relationship. |
| Electric File Monitor | A satirical 'digital security system' that scans the user's hard drive and charges them with various "transgressions", about which the user can "interrogate" them. |
| 2019 | RUNONCE (remember_me) | An interactive digital pet that converses with the user, but can only live one lifetime on the user's computer, after which the program cannot be run again. |
| 2020 | Mackerelmedia Fish | ARG-like game with tie-ins to many of Lawhead's previous works. |
| 2021 | Electric Zine Maker | Free open source zine making tool. |
| 2024 | Blue Suburbia | An ongoing re-imagining of their 1999 project, built in the Unreal engine, exploring concepts of despair and hopelessness through an interactive diary format, framed as a walking simulator. |
Awards
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2015 - Winner, IGF Nuovo Award for Tetrageddon Games
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2017 - Winner, Indiecade Interaction Award for Everything is Going to Be OK
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2017 - Winner, A Maze Digital Moment Award for Everything is Going to Be OK
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2018 - Finalist, IGF Nuovo Award for Everything is Going to Be OK
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2018 - Honorable Mention, IGF Seumas McNally Grand Prize for Everything is Going to Be OK
Notes
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