Looking Outwards 08: The Creative Practice of an Individual

Out of all the speakers throughout the Eyeo Series, I was most drawn to Jane Friedhoff and her whimsical works. Jane is an interdisciplinary creative technologist, artist, and independent game developer. Her goal is to “blur the lines between as many media and genres as she can,” which really spoke to my experiences within the School of Art here at CMU. Friedhoff was previously at The New York Times’ Research & Development Lab and The Office for Creative Research, a hybrid research group that studied the intersection of culture, education, and technology to make tools and experiences that humanized data. As of 2018, she’s currenting working with the Google Creative Lab.

I was really drawn to Friedhoff’s work because of how they enable users to see beauty and have fun within every day small spaces, like her AR experiment Hidden World. Her talk about creating games about power fantasies and her deconstruction of that term in relation to game design, worldbuilding, and stepping away from current societal power dynamics was really engaging and added a level of depth and sophistication to her works that I want to emulate when discussing my own works in the future.

Friedhoff’s Website