Artists Tiyan Baker and Jason Phu have spent hundreds of hours playing Fortnite together. Connected remotely through in-game microphone, for the artists, Fortnite has become a space for artistic discussion and exploration. Recently, Fortnite has connected with Unreal Engine to make its four years worth of assets available to the public to build and modify their own Fortnite worlds. To be presented at Goolugatup for the 2024 Digital Art program, Baker and Phu, in a first time collaboration, will create a new collaborative series of video and sculptural works that utilise the novel possibilities of UEFN (Unreal Engine Fortnite) to make a major new duo show tentatively called Fall Damage. The artists will draw on existing themes in their work, as well as build on shared conversations, to present a series of video, sculptural and interactive works derived from worlds built by the artists in UEFN. Through working collaboratively, Baker and Phu will leverage the map-making capabilities ofUEFN to blend the boundaries between their ideas and their work. Drawing on the nihilistic pleasure of gaming and the possibilities for finding personal agency, in Fall Damage, Baker and Phu will explore such ideas as building utopian futures, speculative altars of worship and communion, transcendence into virtual (after)lives, respawning and survivance.

Image: Tiyan Baker, 'Personal computer : ramin ntaangan', 2022, installation view, The Lock Up, NSW. Documentation by Ben Adams.

Tiyan Baker is an artist who works within stallation, photography, video and sculpture. Her practice draws on historical research, language, digital processes and material play to trace unseen relationships between words, place and stories. Centring her Bidayǔh culture in her works, Baker is also interested in things she has unknowingly inherited. Living far from native lands, culture and family, in the midst of the (re)colonisation ofBorneo, she explores all that can be mistranslated or lost, and what can manifest in its place. Using an artistic logic that is part salvaging and part speculating, her work engages in imaginative storytelling and world-building toreclaim her vision of her indigenous heritage in the face of intergenerational shame and disadvantage, systematic destruction of culture, and geographical disconnect from family and kins. She has shown her works widely across Australia, and is the winner of the 2022 National Photography Prize awarded by the Murray Art Museum Albury. She was born and raised on the Larrakia lands known as Darwin and currently lives and works on the Awabakal and Worimi lands known as Newcastle, Australia.

Jason Phu’s multi-disciplinary practice brings together a wide range of, sometimes contradictory, references from traditional ink paintings to street art, everyday vernacular to official records, personal narratives to historical events. Working across installation, painting and performance, the artist frequently uses humour as a device to explore experiences of cultural dislocation.