Vector Festival 2026 Gamemaking Residency: Gamemakers in Residence
The Vector Festival Gamemaking Residency, curated by Bracy Appeikumoh, supports development of conceptual games, ending in a showcase opportunity. Through their chosen gaming medium, residents will explore the curatorial theme of guts, gunk, and gears.
Consider a computer that desires only your waste fluids in order to power itself. A TV that shuts off when it loses contact to the dead skin cells that slough off your body with each gentle movement. A smart phone with a charging port that switches out with a needle - blood for battery life, 1 liter for 45 minutes of charge time. As the technology that is pushed to the forefront continues to grow in the same cancerous vein as the dystopian imaginings that we were forewarned against in the texts of Octavia Butler, Mike Pondsmith, Ursula K. Le Guin, Harlan Ellison, William Gibson, and Philip K. Dick, how do we bring about reconciliations of this tech as well as create symbiotic systems with our tech for the good of our bodies, our ecosystems, and our self-actualizations?
The showcase will be at InterAccess (32 Lisgar St) from July 16 — 18, with an opening on July 16, 7–9PM.
ABOUT THE GAMEMAKERS IN RESIDENCE
Michael Balangue (they/he) — Honolulu, Hawai'i,
Michael Balangue / Anito Soul is a multidisciplinary artist based in Honolulu, Hawai'i, weaving ancestral evocation, modern ritual, and cultural research rooted in the complexities of the Filipino-American experience. Drawing from animism and Filipino mythology, their practice frames decolonial futurism through spirit as a medium for ecological and ancestral reconnection in an era shaped by technological dominance. Their recent project Amen, Anito! is an audiovisual archive that explores personal and precolonial memory through the energetic traditions of jungle and budots soundscapes. They have performed at cultural institutions including MoMA PS1, Times Square Arts, and The Lot Radio. They are currently developing BALANGAY, a biosensor-based game grounded in Filipino mythology, through NEW INC's Year 12 Extended Realities track. Their work has been supported by Balikbayan Worldwide and Tropical Futures Institute, and they serve as Program Director of Biodesign Challenge, an international education nonprofit at the intersection of art, design, and biotechnology.
Madeline "stormy" Hanitijo (they/she/he) — Toronto
Madeline "stormy" Hanitijo is a queer, Chinese-Canadian digital artist, game developer, and creative technologist based in Toronto. They work with open source software, game engines, and microcontrollers. Stormy's work centers on video games and DIY playful technologies to play them, such as unorthodox controllers. As a lover of all things cute, she creates cozy and vibrant worlds for visitors to play in.
gillian blekkenhorst (they/them) — Toronto
gillian blekkenhorst is a Canadian artist and experimental narrative designer working across multiple media, but tending towards games, ttrpgs, comics, writing, fabrication, poetry, illustration, etc, etc, and next week they'll be someone else. Their work deals with fear, vulnerability, monstrous embodiment, cognitive dissonance, reluctant capitalism, never knowing what's going on inside the meat or the mind of yourself or anyone else and feeling generally haunted.
Sasha Reneau (they/them) — Los Angeles, California
Sasha Reneau designs and illustrates tabletop and video games that play with fatalism, mental health, and the antagonistic limits of human-operated systems. Armed with a cocktail of 3 years on testosterone and 30 years dealing with chronic mental illness, Sasha leverages a Bachelor's Degree in Digital Media towards reflective, generated-by-hand tabletop roleplaying games like Spindlewheel; towards horrifying moral quandaries mixed with humor in animatic ambitions like Candy Vampire; and towards ideas of the Monstrous Divine with their illustrations of angel trueforms. Sasha's roots stand astride history, tracing back to Russian Jews fleeing imperial pogroms, and English colonists razing the land that would become America. From their home in Los Angeles, they bear witness as the pretense of democracy melts off the US's skull.
Reneau will be reciving programing support by Sasha Poujlivaia, a cryptid last spotted in the Bay Area, only ever seen in the dappled light of her garden, between the ears of friendly cats, or haunting renowned museums. Legend has it she can be lured out of hiding with the promise of a dark cave, a shiny sword, or the mention of any strange hobby last popular in the 1800s. She likes long cold walks on the beach, dismantling late stage capitalism, and curling up with a good book. She has wrangled computers from a bitter age and is cursed with programmer's hands that she keeps in a jar by the door.
DJ MeTime (she/her) — Toronto
DJ MeTime (Sarah Barrable-Tishauer) is a DJ and interdisciplinary experience designer working across music, participatory performance, and play. Their practice explores the dancefloor as more than a party, a dreamspace for collective world-building where sound and movement invite connection and transformation. With a background in Intermedia and Computation Arts from Concordia University, she designs embodied, large-scale experiences that function as live-action role-playing systems. These works invite audiences into shared futurist narratives as active participants. Projects such as PORTAL (SummerWorks), R.A.V.E. (Luminato Festival), and Wonderverse have engaged thousands through interactive environments shaped by music and facilitation. Most recently, she launched Brightside, a participatory greenhouse experience that draws on systems design and biomimicry to structure playful rituals for collective wellbeing. Rooted in Afrofuturism and the Black queer origins of dance music, her work reactivates the dancefloor as an ancestral technology for care and collective imagination.
Olivia Reynolds (she/her) — Toronto
Olivia Reynolds is an artist-filmmaker and recent grad based in Toronto. Through a multi-media approach, she uses her work to tell stories, distilling rich fantasies and alternate worlds into manageable bites. She is intrigued by the past, present and future of media and technology, and explores their lifecycles in her work. Her latest installation project, Televoyance, embeds video into the physical world, through careful references to television's form, history and spiritual past. Made almost entirely from salvaged electronic waste, the project won Olivia the 2026 OCAD U Medal for the Integrated Media program. She also co-created and produced the playful and satirical webseries Ruby's Cube with OCAD U LiVE, which plays on genres of film and experimental filmmaking and storytelling techniques. Olivia is known to plug in cables until things work, and ultimately likes to write, read and create in her (nonexistent) free time.
ABOUT THE CURATOR
Bracy Appeikumoh is a scholar archivist artist whose work centers reimagining desire and pleasure wholly divested from the diktats of empire and all of its baggage. Her erotic fiction takes place in queer futures embodying queer pre-colonial pasts; her non-fiction ponders how we get here. She is burdened by the urgent need to restore, preserve, and disseminate indigenous ways of being and knowing. Octavia E. Butler, bell hooks, Audre Lorde, Toni Morrison, June Jordan, Lorraine Hansberry, Maya Angelou, Claudia Jones, Toni Cade Bambara, Zora Neale Hurston, Assata Shakur, Nina Simone, Marion Stokes.
ABOUT VECTOR FESTIVAL
Vector Festival is a participatory and community-oriented initiative dedicated to showcasing digital games and creative media practices. Presenting works across a dynamic range of exhibitions, screenings, performances, lectures, and workshops, Vector acts as a critical bridge between emergent digital platforms and new media art practice.
The festival was founded in 2013 as the “Vector Game Art & New Media Festival” by an independent group of artists and curators: Skot Deeming, Clint Enns, kris kim, and Katie Micak, who were later joined by Diana Poulsen and Martin Zeilinger.