Video Games- “Kentucky Route Zero” by Cardboard Computer

 Animation, Architecture, Art, Artists, Books, Conceptual Art, Design, Digital Art, Drawing, Illustration, Music, Musicians / Bands, Quotes, Video and Film, Video Games
Jul 162025
 

Kentucky Route Zero  is a point-and-click adventure game created by Jake Elliott, Tamas Kemenczy, and musician Ben Babbitt working together as Cardboard Computer. Started in 2011 with Kickstarter funding, it contains five parts and four interludes that were released over several years, with the final section completed in 2020.

The game begins with a truck driver named Conway arriving at a highway gas station with his dog. He is having trouble finding the address he was given for his delivery. From there you travel with him over various roads, an underground highway, and eventually even by boat. Along the way you stop at museums, an abandoned mine, local bars, an odd office building, a cave filled with bats, and more while meeting several of the area’s residents. You can choose to learn more about the characters and often join them to explore locations. The story unfolds with no sense of urgency and you are often given the choice to move on or to stay and explore further.

Filled with magical realist elements, it is often a world that can still feel depressingly familiar. Most of the characters are struggling in some way with the effects a failing economy, something that feels even more relevant since 2020. But there are also glimmers of hope in the ways the characters show up for each other- adapting, creating, and forming communities.

Below are a few selections from the game’s interludes that provide engaging breaks from the main story.

In Limits and Demonstrations three characters visit an art museum. You can check out several artworks including- Overdubbed Nam June Paik installation in the style of Edward Packard, which pays homage to Nam June Paik’s 1963 work, Random Access.

Scenes from The Entertainment– a play directed by one of the characters-

One of the phones from Here and There Along The Echo– you dial the number and the character Will (played by musician Will Oldham) reads information from the Echo River’s Bureau of Secret Tourism.

Scenes from Un Pueblo De Nada take place at the public access station- you can also find a live action version here.

Kentucky Route Zero is a game that stays with you long after it finishes. There are lots of things to discover and it’s worth playing more than once to find them. The website Highway Zero is good for things you may have missed.

The game is available for purchase on their website and can also currently be found on Netflix.

 

NYC Art Shows- Tyler Mitchell at Gagosian

 Art, Art Shows by Location, Artists, Mixed Media, New York Art Shows, Photographers / Photography
Apr 022025
 

“The sky is cold but the wing blood hot”, 2024

“Cumberland Island Tableau”, 2024

“Convivial Conversation”, 2024

Photographer Tyler Mitchell returns to his home state of Georgia to capture images that hint at the past histories of the American South for his latest exhibition, Ghost Images at Gagosian gallery in NYC.

From the press release-

“And this beauty carries within itself the intimation that the past can never die because it still exists, intact, on some other plane of time, around which we cannot see directly.” 
—Clarence John Laughlin

“The way we disappear. And reappear.” 
—Robin Coste Lewis

Engaging with Southern gothic themes, Mitchell’s new images of seaside leisure (all works 2024) are rooted in his Southern upbringing and explore the psychological space of memory, questioning how photographic tableaux might capture presences that are unseen but deeply felt. They also ask if photographs have the capacity to document memory and express self-determination in the light of history.

This body of work was shot on Jekyll and Cumberland Islands, off the coast of Georgia, when Mitchell returned to his home state in preparation for Idyllic Space, his 2024 exhibition at the High Museum of Art, Atlanta. The images are set among the beaches, dunes, estuaries, park structures, and ruins of these barrier islands—landscapes of natural beauty that are imprinted with significant human histories. In 1858, the penultimate ship known to have transported enslaved people to the United States landed on Jekyll Island, an event to which the toy boats in Gulfs Between allude. Now protected as national seashore, Cumberland Island is the site of a ruined mansion owned by the Carnegie family, who once controlled much of the island.

Old Fear and Old Joys and Buoyancy are scenes of leisure and evocative compositional suspension. In many of the works, Mitchell veils his subjects. Ghost Image features a boy peering out through a shroud-like net, while the figures of Convivial Conversation and The sky is cold but the wing blood hot are transformed by scrims of sheet and kite that channel the sunlight. The artist further explores layering and ephemerality by innovatively printing photographs onto mirrors, and onto sheets of fabric draped over empty frames. Inspired by photographers who were drawn to intangible aspects of space, spirit, and the human form, including Clarence John Laughlin, Frederick Sommer, and Francesca Woodman, Mitchell employs superimposition, multiple exposures, and fragmented composition to assert material presence while picturing apparitions of the past.

This exhibition closes 4/5/25.