These pictures were made for an article that was printed in Pin-Up Magazine. Images of a tropical paradise do not reveal that they are taken from within a war zone.

These are some of the pictures I captured from the game Skyrim. In many of the other games I was interested in the act of turning away from the designers into to look at what was only ever meant to be part of the background. In Skyrim, the only thing that players are discouraged from doing is to stop playing the game, which results in the camera leaving the player's body and circling overhead. These were all captured in the space of two minutes, the amount of time before that idle animation began playing. The frames are painted with the averaged color of the images.

These photos were inspired by the work of Robert Adams. I was fascinated by their series Light Balances and wanted to try and explore the virtual world from the perspective of an alternate photographic tradition.

These were from the first photos that I ever took from within a game. They were inspired by wanting to render these sites of violence in two ways, with the same critical gaze in which we would capture the real world, and through the lens of romantic traditions such as the Hudson River Valley school of painters. I found myself returning to this site numerous times of the years, see the show 'the dust never settles' for examples. In wanting these to read specifically as photos rather than screenshots, I borrowed from the style and approach of Ansel Adams, referencing the tradition of landscape photography in America.

The original Sands Casino was an amalgamation of American dreams, a place in the middle of nowhere where everything was possible, where you could go from rich to poor within the space of a heartbeat, where stars from the silver screen came to sing and perform, putting on shows that transcended the moment they lived in, and that became part of our cultural memory. It was a place both physical and imaginary, where fantasies came true and where realities transformed into myth.

The Sands is not quite a mirage, not quite a mirror, and not quite the thing itself. Combining the work of numerous artists, The Sands becomes a new kind of venue for a group show, one where the works are able to take turns occupying the gallery space, and where different pieces, paired together through chance, interact in unexpected ways. The works in this show are neither acting in concert with one another nor competing for your attention, they simply share the same space and time in ways that are sometimes funny, sometimes poignant, and occasionally even discordant.

The show is a 1:1 recreation of the gallery in VR and viewers inside the virtual installation will be able to walk in and around the physical space of the gallery, able to touch the walls and navigate around a pedestal in the center of the room.

Artists in the show include: Valentina Zamfirescu Banggeul Han Alex M. Lee Ilana Savdie Antonia Kuo Young Joo Lee William Wheeler Ellis von Sternberg Dan Swindel Justin Berry Jonathan Ehrenberg Philip Vanderhyden Johannes DeYoung Federico Solmi Nicholas O'Brien Organized by Justin Berry, Valentina Zamfirescu, Ilana Savdie, and the rest of the Blended Reality Crew.

Labyrinths is a Virtual Reality exhibition that features the works of twenty-four artists in a virtual gallery maze. Classically, the labyrinth is a space where serendipity, danger, and opportunity lurk around every corner. Like the labyrinthian archetype of the minotaur, Virtual Reality enables hybrid forms of imagination and embodiment. Its opportunities can simultaneously engage the worst human impulses or rise to new heights of human aspiration. Archetypal narratives unfold in recursive rhythms, and the spiraling structure of the maze is site for both self-reflection and projection.

Labyrinths have long symbolized psychic and spiritual journeys. In this exhibition, the virtual space becomes a meta-cognitive site where poetic association happens through strange encounters. The exhibition is built upon a mode of controller-less navigation, in which fully embodied navigation drives exploration. The maze itself finds resonant structure in the architecture of the inner ear, which directly effects human sense of proprioception, balance, and spatial awareness. Throughout the maze, participants experience artworks that explore themes self and embodiment, representation and materiality, time and space.

Labyrinths features works by Sara Abbaspour, Rebecca Aston, Bobby Berry, Justin Berry, Philip Birch, Camille Chabrol, Blinn & Lambert, Lance Chantiles-Wertz, Michael Costagliola, Johannes DeYoung, John Eberhart, Jonathan Ehrenberg, Rebecca Gilbert, Jake Jefferies, Antonia Kuo, Adam Moftah, Nicholas O’Brien, Mike Rader, Ilana Savdie, Federico Solmi, Anahita Vossoughi, Jack Wesson, Natalie Westbrook, and Valentina Zamfirescu. The platform utilizes a mode of embodied navigation developed at Yale University’s Center for Collaborative Arts and Media, presented at the IEEE GEM 2018 conference in Galway, Ireland.

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This project grew out my research group in Blended Reality at Yale. We built and curated it collectively. My personal work in the show was a collaboration with Rebecca Gilbert. We built a cube of water that converts the world to black and white when you step inside it. Bubbles emerge from the floor and carry with them all the different sounds of water captured in a 24 hour period, from bathing our daughter, sitting at the beach, taking a shower, using the toilet, washing our hands, etc.

"From either Cape North or Ingonish, get off the Cabot Trail in the direction of Neil's harbour (if coming from Ingonish), and, drive along the coast to White Point. Descending into town, but not to the docks, look for the "Two Tittles" Inn, and immediately to the right, you will find a dirt road that leads you 200m up a parking spot. Park and continue by foot, you will really enjoy this hike/stroll as a complement to a longer hike in the area (Peak at Tenor Reef or perhaps Meat Cove, or a paddle at White Point). "

"It has what seems to be classic alpine tundra and meadow that you'd see on a B.C. mountain peak, only you are 100 feet off the ocean floor where waves crash through sea stacks (towers of rock), and, the hills run one after another until you reach the grave of the unknown sailor. Above it, a white cross. Beyond it, several unreachable Islands of a small archipelago (The Tittles). Washed up sailors from ship-wrecks were buried here, in simple graves adorned by unmarked granite stones, which somehow fit perfectly with the natural setting." *

What does it mean when you see the rugged coast, slammed by the rising tide, but cannot hear the roar of the waves as they pour through the breakers and gurgle down into the dampened sand? Nor feel the salinated wind on your cheek - nor the smell of cut pine and wet moss - nor the awkward footing of the stones beneath your feet as you slide down the cliff to better see the surface of the stones?

A photograph is the translation of sight into a still image. What is it called when you capture the light of a place, then shine it upon somewhere new? Here the light from White Point has been captured, preserved, and used to illuminate a series of virtual spaces, including a spartan pavilion and an art gallery.

White Point itself is included in the exhibition, a 360 degree panorama of nine locations, nine times of day, and nine kinds of weather (mostly overcast).

* from trailpeak.com

In Active/Idle Justin Berry is presenting three new pieces, one digital performance in the form of a projection, and two sculptural video pieces. The digital performance involves the artist playing the video game Skyrim in God-Mode and then walking away, allowing the game's idle animation to continue playing. Day and night pass by in virtual time, while a pair of wolves endlessly stalk and attack the player's avatar to no avail.

An idle animation is the animation that happens in a video game when the player ceases to play. It is usually an animation of the avatar doing something to show that they are bored, annoyed, frustrated, or impatient. One of the most famous idle animations is of Sonic the Hedgehog tapping his foot and staring at the player. Idle animations inevitably break through any sense of immersion that we might have in a game, reminding us that we are outside looking in at a fantasy world.

In the two video/sculptures presented in this show, Berry transforms idle and active animations into recurring Gifs, presented on older CRT monitors. One video shows Mega Man's pet dog endlessly laying about being bored, while the other shows Sonic, ever impatient to move, moving forever and ever in a dizzying loop. Both videos are visible through mirror/glass panels hovering above them, held in place with studio lighting equipment. The set-up is reminiscent of the traditional arcade box, though all of its mechanisms are left visible and exposed.

"From either Cape North or Ingonish, get off the Cabot Trail in the direction of Neil's harbour (if coming from Ingonish), and, drive along the coast to White Point. Descending into town, but not to the docks, look for the "Two Tittles" Inn, and immediately to the right, you will find a dirt road that leads you 200m up a parking spot. Park and continue by foot, you will really enjoy this hike/stroll as a complement to a longer hike in the area (Peak at Tenor Reef or perhaps Meat Cove, or a paddle at White Point). "

"It has what seems to be classic alpine tundra and meadow that you'd see on a B.C. mountain peak, only you are 100 feet off the ocean floor where waves crash through sea stacks (towers of rock), and, the hills run one after another until you reach the grave of the unknown sailor. Above it, a white cross. Beyond it, several unreachable Islands of a small archipelago (The Tittles). Washed up sailors from ship-wrecks were buried here, in simple graves adorned by unmarked granite stones, which somehow fit perfectly with the natural setting." *

What does it mean when you see the rugged coast, slammed by the rising tide, but cannot hear the roar of the waves as they pour through the breakers and gurgle down into the dampened sand? Nor feel the salinated wind on your cheek - nor the smell of cut pine and wet moss - nor the awkward footing of the stones beneath your feet as you slide down the cliff to better see the surface of the stones?

A photograph is the translation of sight into a still image. What is it called when you capture the light of a place, then shine it upon somewhere new? Here the light from White Point has been captured, preserved, and used to illuminate a series of virtual spaces, including a spartan pavilion and an art gallery.

White Point itself is included in the exhibition, a 360 degree panorama of nine locations, nine times of day, and nine kinds of weather (mostly overcast).

* from trailpeak.com

Berry's installation proposes the video game as a site for non-competition, aesthetic wanderlust and contemplation. Two high-definition monitors display magnificent skies that transition from day to night. While the videos appear to be documentary footage, the recordings are revealed as vistas from the fictional landscape of Skyrim, a video game developed by Tod Howard in 2011. Upon its release, Skyrim received rave reviews for its "open world" format, which allows players the freedom to travel anywhere at any time and to ignore the main quest indefinitely, gaining points even for sensitive activities, such as picking flowers.

The only action a player is not allowed to do is stop playing-this is the moment Berry's work kicks in. After two minutes of stillness or, in this case, sky-gazing, the game rejects the player, pulling the camera's gaze away from the landscape and pointing it back at the player's avatar. Berry re-constitutes the moments where the player ceased to play and decided to simply be still, stitching together those stretches of sky-gazing into a 24-hour showcase. The videos are timed so that noon on one screen meets midnight on the other.

Offduty recognizes a great paradox of the virtual world-players who enter these supremely creative tapestries feel real emotions, create formative memories that are not compartmentalized and try on new bodies and personas. These worlds are legitimate sites for meeting the other, coming of age, making decisions and passing time. The game too behaves and develops an intimate and responsive role with its player. In the face of this existential dilemma, where the real world and the digital blend into one, Berry searches for the space where the game shows itself, asserts its power, and reveals its physical limits.

This show was based around the work of a fictional artist, named Gardner Reintz, who created a physical representation of the night sky by placing white pins in the wall. His father had begun to go blind and, since their only shared interest was astronomy, he created this installation so that his father could 'see' the sky once again, restoring the bridge between them.

This show was based around the work of Yves Klein, specifically his "The Specialization of Sensibility in the Raw Material State into Stabilized Pictorial Sensibility, The Void". For that show he the gallery was filled with no material objects or artifacts, only the auratic tension produced by works of art. In this Waymaker show I attempted recreate that experiment in the virtual space of the Waymaker Gallery. The visual experience below is an artifact from the show.

For this show I rebuilt the back office of the Waymaker Gallery and allowed visitors to rifle through the shelves and drawers, visiting the webiste through two on-site computers located at the owners desk and at the information counter. The green wall acted as a portal to the absent show.

This show was produced in collaboration with the children of Clinton Middle School. I asked one group of children to decide what sort of objects belonged in the art show and then worked with a second group of students to decide what the stories were behind all the works of art.

This show was produced with another artist who chose to remain anonymous. The initial premise of the show was to have a show of Jackson Pollock paintings displayed on the ground, the way that the artist would have seen them. Part of the power of Pollock's work is that it resisted being seen as an image, a quality that has since been lost in the wake of his huge popular success. Since it would be impossible to make a show about resisting the impulse to view something as an image, and then document it with imagery, it was decided that viewers could only see the show through video. Each painting had a video dedicated to act of looking at it in space.

The Waymaker Gallery was invited to participate in Chicago's NEXT fair. Rather than pack up a bunch of works and try to sell them as might be expected, I sent out an open call asking for images of 2D art works. Once I had the work of about twenty artists, I built a virtual booth in which to display the artworks and printed a catalogue of the works on view. For the actual booth I simply set up a green screen and a camera and asked visitors to select the artwork they wished to view. Once the fair was over I carefully composited each of the visitors into the gallery, looking at the work of their choice, and sent an email to everyone who had participated and provided a site where they could download their image. The 164 images are cycled randomly.

This show was produced in collaboration with the artist Alexander Lee. When asked what he would do for an art show if he could anything at all, he said that he would like to take the entire corner of Wabash and Monroe from Chicago and place it into a gallery. The idea was to take the exterior context of his daily walk to school and reframe it within the context of the gallery, inverting our expectations and revealing the inability of the gallery setting to properly convey the majority of our experience.

This show was produced in collaboration with Jason Loebs. When Kazimir Malevich was returning from Poland in the 1920's he was harassed while going through customs because his art was considered dangerous. Through an anecdote from a fictional newspaper we imagined that the only way he would be able to get his drawings through customs was to lie and say that they were really architectural plans. Based on this premise we constructed the 'buildings' that his drawing might have implied. The buildings were each generated by a small amount of computer code, some of which was written on the wall of the gallery.

This show was the first show at the Waymaker Gallery and it was produced with a fictional artist named Oomlou Nioni. I made a brief stop motion animation at an extremely high resolution and then re-edited that animation over and over, moving within the frame. The animation is of a cartoon water dragon like the Loch Ness monster who moves in a manner counter to our intuition. We expect the part of the creature that we cannot see to echo the part that we can see, yet the truth is that the part of the dragon underneath the water is unknown and unknowable and so it does not need to act according to the expectations and demands of our reason.

(to come)