“Orienting Desires” art arcade

Ahmed Essam 

A Bird's Tale is a short, hand-crafted platformer that tells a heartfelt story of a bird, its children, and the fragile home they share. Players navigate gentle landscapes using glide and jump mechanics, helping the bird protect its nest and preserve a sense of peace amidst growing threats. Developed for the Free Palestine Jam, this poetic game is built with Godot and enriched by carefully chosen visual and audio assets to evoke care, resilience, and quiet resistance. 

Yara Feghali

Be.Longing XR is a filmic road diary seen through the eyes of Amal, an immigrant woman from Beirut who just Landed in Los Angeles. We join her on her journey through a fictitious reconstructed residential streetscape as she searches for signs of her queer and lesbian community on the houses’ front yards, porches, and windows. Through photogrammetry and artificial intelligence this work documents over 35 residential houses in various residential neighborhoods in L.A. during the pandemic summer of 2019. 

Danielle Brathwaite Shirley 

An Interactive archive made to store and centre Black Trans People. To preserve our experiences, our thoughts, our feelings, our lives. TO REMEMBER US EVEN WHEN WE ARE AT RISK OF BEING ERASED. 

Rah Eleh 

Candy Flip takes us on a multidimensional quest in search of community, home and kinship. The world-making project celebrates queer club culture and waacking-a dance style that emerged in gay clubs in Los Angeles during the 1970s disco era. The work is a tribute to the artist's younger self and a recognition of the many subcultures that have shaped her experiences and influenced her artistic style.The work was created at Onassis ONX in New York City with the members from the dance company The Fabulous Waack Dancers, including Princess Lockerooo, Tyrone Bevans and Zenta Mugler and soundscapes by OBUXUM and Peaches. 

Brendan Tang

Clay Fighter draws on my lifelong connection to video games, particularly Street Fighter, the first time I saw a South Asian character represented-albeit problematically-in popular culture. Dhalsim’s portrayal nonetheless offered an early image of South Asian male power, contrasting common stereotypes. For Clay Fighter, I reimagined him as a ceramic artist, creating a self-reflective homage that examines identity, representation, and how artistic practice can overshadow the self. 

Mohsen Hazrati

Drawing on The Divan by fourteenth-century Persian poet Hafez, the artist creates an AI system rooted in chance and spiritual inquiry. A randomly selected verse becomes the seed for an algorithm that gathers unpredictable text fragments from the internet, generating individualized divinations for viewers. By minimizing his own intervention, the artist echoes Iranian traditions where a budgerigar chooses the prophetic verse, allowing chance—not the human hand—to guide the process. The title’s reference to “none,” meaning “without intelligence” in Farsi, signals a deliberate rejection of commercial AI’s logic. Instead, the artist cultivates an AI that behaves almost “drunk,” inviting a form of digital divination that is intuitive, unruly, and spiritually.

Rebecca Merlic 

Created through collaborations and rituals exploring new forms of feminism, LGBTQ+, Drag transformations and intimate sensitive representations of the protagonists. The avatar becomes a collective and politically charged body responding to socio-political factors as well as to the very male-dominated world of video games by creating an interactive digital space, a fluid journey through infinite individual, gender, and realities. It is an interactive computer game as well as an immersive experience in virtual reality (VR). Using 3D scans, she makes digital avatars for real people, which are then embedded into virtual landscapes. 

Yemi Adegbesan 

Is an Afrofuturist meditation on the idea of a Black collective unconscious. Drawing from Yoruba cosmology and a profound belief in the seamless interplay between the spiritual and physical realms, the work considers our place within an ongoing continuum; shaped by the actions of our ancestors even as we, in the present, shape the lives of future descendants. A rhythmic composition from a l l i e and THE KOUNT which is an invitation for audiences to reflect on their own place in the continuum of existence, celebrating the interconnectedness that binds us across time and space. 

Hyphen-Labs 

A VR installation designed as a futuristic beauty salon where visitors sit as “clients” and enter immersive scenarios through a headset. Inside, they experience speculative worlds centering Black women’s bodies, voices, and technologies — from brain optimization tools to protective hairstyles that double as surveillance countermeasures. The project blends virtual reality, product design, and activism, creating an Afrofuturist.

Gabbah Baya 

Pomegranates is a 15-minute narrative game that memorializes Palestinians killed since October 7, 2024, through intimate storytelling and 3D reconstruction. Inspired by the Martyrs of Gaza archive, it reimagines lives lost by focusing on their dreams and identities rather than their deaths. Players explore digitally resurrected landmarks and personal histories, creating space for remembrance, resistance, and reflection on Palestine’s ongoing struggle. 

Lucas LaRochelle 

Queering the Map is a community-generated counter-mapping project for digitally archiving LGBTQ2IA+ experience in relation to physical space. The platform provides an interface to collaboratively archive the cartography of queer memory—from park benches to the middle of the ocean—in order to preserve our histories and unfolding realities, which continue to be invalidated, contested, and erased. From collective action to stories of coming out, encounters with violence to moments of rapturous love, Queering the Map functions as a living archive of LGBTQ2IA+ life. 

Rashaad Newsome 

Self Inventions pays homage to the spirit of perpetual regeneration and innovation in Black culture. Rashaad Newsome’s shape-shifting robotic figure reflects the resilience of Black people in the face of ongoing struggle. The optical effect of transformation from one form to another employs fractal geometry, an aesthetic that, along with the designs of the robotic figures themselves, is inspired by African art and its early use of abstraction. 

Jawa El Khash 

Tiles Revisited is a series of two web based simulations (Lot#1 and Lot #2) that revitalizes an ancient tile by re-imagining the way we can experience it online using Unity WebGL. Resembling a labyrinth, a single tile is transformed from a 2D image into an extruded 3D landscape that one can navigate and be immersed in. This style of storytelling looks to the future of archiving by inviting the world into an accessible interactive way of learning the history of a single ancient tile. While each corner may seem like a detour, you will be immersed in the architectural design of each tile, where a small brush stroke becomes a colossal wall motif. This project was generously funded by the Ontario Arts Council and the Government of Ontario.