CARSON LYNN

Carson Lynn is an artist who through the usage of digital materials, sublime landscapes, and exploration within gamespaces, creates artworks as a queering of heterocentric photographic conventions and game systems.

Carson received a MFA from ArtCenter College of Design in 2020, and also received a BFA in Photography and Imaging from the same school in 2015.

Carson is currently based in Camarillo, CA.

︎ - carson@carsonlynn.com
︎ - @carsontlynn
︎ - carsonlynn
︎ - carsonlynn

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!CURSED! (2022)

!CURSED! is a multimedia exhibition consisting of several digitally-constructed collages and a short machinima film. The images were created through the appropriation and influence of various sources including public domain illustrations, analog photographs of gamescapes, queer zine archives, and memetic typography.

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“Q: What’s the only recourse in this fuck-pissed, insane stink-rot oriface called alive?

A: WITHDRAWL IN DISGUST.”

- Dave, Fuh Cole: Issue #3 (1993)

From edgelord reapers to memetic jesters, contemporary depictions of skeletons serve as avatars of both hyper-masculine aesthetics and queer absurdity. While the former aspect revolves around death and toxic machismo, the later instead focuses on a newfound ethos: a way of existing beyond the typical binary of life and death, winning and losing, one and zero.

Inspired by queer zine culture and its usage of appropriated imagery, !CURSED! takes its name from within the Dark Souls role-playing game franchise. The players and characters in these games are cursed with undeath: doomed to wander an uncaring landscape until the eventual collapse of spacetime. Despite the games’ infamous difficulty and often disquieting setting, the series employs a purposeful balance of emotions. For every corrupted monarch and insurmountable obstacle, there are always moments of joyous exultation, slapstick humor, and artistic beauty.

Queerness is a similar cacophony of emotions: anger, elation, trauma, euphoria, shame, pleasure. To deny one is to deny the rest. In order to fully experience queer happiness, one must also stare directly into the abyss of discrimination and suffering. It’s a hollowing experience, and yet I have loved every moment of it.

Don’t give up, fellow skeleton. We may suffer, but we will make a path that is our own: beyond the reach of the binaries and the fading flame of imposed orders.

DEAR EIDOLON (2021)

Dear Eidolon is a machinima film presented as a fireside dialogue between myself and my avatar, along with the many forms it can take. By blurring the lines between gamespaces, I sought to explore my complex relationship to these virtual environments that serve as sites for both trauma and discovery.

Dear Eidolon was created for the ArtCenter College of Design Graduate Fellowship: Fall 2020, and was a part of The Modern Art Museum of Fort Worth’s exhibition I’ll Be Your Mirror: Art and the Digital Screen.

STORM AND STRESS (2020)

Storm and Stress was created for Silicon Valet’s Lot Residency #07, which took place on their Instagram page on August 1st and 2nd, 2020. The image was divided into 9 sections, with each section also containing a unique short machinima clip. Behind-the-scenes information was also posted to the page’s stories, which were then cataloged in a highlight.

Following the residency, there also was an artist talk on August 13th, 2020, with Wade Wallerstein, the founder of Silicon Valet and the co-director of TRANSFER Gallery, and myself. The talk took place virtually inside VRChat in a custom-made space, designed by me.

You can watch an archive of the talk on Silicon Valet’s Twitch channel.

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Within these glitchscapes, I can be as queer as I want.

I WANT (2020)

I Want is a six channel video installation made as my graduate thesis show. Originally intended to be a public exhibition in March of 2020, the installation now exists as a virtual recreation. This virtual installation can be experienced by downloading the application here. Mac and Windows versions are available.

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Gamespaces are often coated in a photorealistic veneer: .jpg skins warped onto three- dimensional geometric skeletons. Underneath the illusions are unsanctioned parallel universes. Faux flora dots the surface of these iridescent sublime glitchscapes. This is only possible to see through a refusal of a game's systems and code: glitching, modding, and hacking. There's a term to describe these tactics of intervention: countergaming.

If my interest is in making game environments into queer spaces for unlearning and introspection, is it enough to just inject queerness into the code of the game? A heterocentric game with a rainbow filter is still a heterocentric game: a queer ludic experience needs to be built from the ground up to incorporate queerness at its core.

Machinima, the practice of making films using video game frameworks and assets, could be the answer. By translating the game away from its original context and boundaries, new queerer realities can emerge. There are no restrictive gameplay mechanics or invisible walls. The landscape becomes a stage. The player becomes a camera.

ODDBALL (2019)

Oddball is a short machinima film with all footage taken directly from Halo 2, with the help of the Project Cartographer mod. All text is appropriated from real conversations between players in various Halo games, taken from YouTube videos uploaded between 2006 - 2010.

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On May 6th, 2015, queer games critic Aevee Bee penned a personal essay titled “I love my untouchable virtual body”. In the text, she talks about the dodge mechanic in the action role-playing game Bloodborne, which negates all harm dealt to the player during an incredibly brief window of time. Bee wishes that this evade was a superpower she possessed: “that if you could fit every moment of pain in that one tenth of a second you could be invincible for the rest of your life.”

But your character in Halo 2 is not meant to directly avoid damage like this. Halo’s virtual bodies are meant to be used, mangled, and riddled with bullet holes. Corpses are strewn across battlefields to show where danger resides. In the Oddball gametype, skulls are objectives and props that are handled like bowling balls and not like the remains of a human being. The only way to heal wounds is to find cover and wait: to slink away and hide from the violent world.

In 2004, Halo 2 was the first game I played online with a public voice chat, and with that my first encounters with homophobic language. These outbursts, most often due to rage, always centered around the body: physical harm, rape, and death. My real body was never in peril, but my developing queer self was under attack through the internalization of this homophobia. This queer self had to heal, and the only way was to find cover and wait.