Makerspace Residency Talk with Andrea Arts and JohnClaud Ruder

Please join us on Thursday September 10th for a virtual artist talk and presentation. Andrea Arts and JohnClaud Ruder will discuss their residencies at the LCDSS Makerspace's residency program. There will be time at the end for a Q + A about their experience and about the residency process in general. Andrea Arts is an MFA candidate in Fibers and Material Studies. Originally from Michigan, she earned her BA in Studio Art from the College of Wooster and has been based in Philadelphia since 2021. Working across disciplines and drawing from her background in performance and theatre design, she is currently exploring ideas of truth, artifice, power, and clowns through the lens of Shakespeare.

About Andrea’s Project: In my first year of graduate study, I have been investigating themes of artifice, mimicry, miscommunication, and deception through a theatrical lens. Drawing on my background in performance and theater design, my work explores constructions of truth—asking how narratives are shaped, obscured, or revealed. I am wondering, how is meaning manipulated and how might we begin to unravel the real from the masquerade? Central to this inquiry is the figure of the fool. Historically positioned at the edge of power, the fool uses artifice to expose truth. This has led me to investigate clowning, puppetry, the court jester, and the circus as sites where humor, illusion, and subversion intersect.

JohnClaud Ruder is a Philadelphia-based an artist who primarily works across video collage and sculpture. Drawing from archival YouTube videos and an array of found children’s toys, Ruder manipulates a variety of materials with repetitive interventions like chopping up and slicing together. They employ mimicry and disruptive coloration as a technique to interrogate pop cultural performativity. Through this ambient pattern-making, Ruder engages with themes such as gender, grief, and play in the digital space. They are currently pursuing their MFA at Tyler School of Art and Architecture.

About their residency project: This project is intended to be an extension of an ongoing experimental video collages and sculptures that examine para-social relationships formed within gaming communities. To do so, I have been (and will continue) looking at the specific example of Call of Duty, and the Call of Duty community. Focusing on legendary Call of Duty player SB Sway, I have been mining the archives of videos made in the decade after his death. These videos are of “trickshots”. They are screen recordings of gamers accomplishing difficult and commendable game ending “shots”. Typically, the audio is just electronic music. However, in the videos published on YouTube after the death of SB Sway, the fans and gamers reposted videos of Sway’s trickshots, this time with their voices and feelings instead of music. Together, they function as in-memorium videos. Through this niche and ephemeral corner of the internet, I have been exploring the ways that friendship and intimacy grow within these predominantly male gaming spaces. The videos made by SB Sway’s fans reveal the immense impact that para-social relationships can have on the emotional development of boys and young men into their adulthood.