The Street Arcade

This collaborative, community-based video game art project was funded by A BLADE OF GRASS Fellowship for Socially Engaged Art, a nationally-competitive grant supporting social practice artists.

Over the summer of 2015, Plug-In Studio (Kerry Richardson & Steve Ciampaglia) collaborated with 13 teen artists from Chicago's South Side to create a series of video games on contemporary social issues chosen by the teens: white privilege, racial profiling, peer pressure, immigration and others. These 2D pixel art games were installed at the Street Arcade, an outdoor public video game event at Hyde Park Art Center in Chicago. The Plug-In Studio designed and fabricated five custom arcade consoles with red knob joysticks and big plastic buttons. These were placed along Cornell Ave on a warm summer evening, with each console projecting the games in large scale onto the exterior of the Art Center building. As community members gathered on the sidewalk to play the games, the teen artists engaged them in a dialogue about the issues addressed in the games.

The project was offered in partnership with Hyde Park Art Center.