University of Oregon 2025-26 Visiting Artist Lecture Series
Presented by the Department of Art and Center for Art Research

This talk explores Alice Bucknell’s work through the lens of clipping: the moment in a video game when the player slips through a wall or falls beyond the map. Often treated as a technical error, clipping becomes a method for breaking open systems and exposing their ecological, political, and epistemic structures. Across projects such as The Alluvials (2023), Small Void (2025), and Earth Engine (both 2026), Bucknell uses gamespace as a site for speculative experimentation, blurring boundaries between humans and nonhuman, natural and synthetic intelligences, and self vs world. In this framework, play offers an affective encounter with the world that’s grounded in total feeling rather than totalized knowledge. Clipping the horizon means colliding with the limits of perception itself and tumbling sideways into a world that resists being mapped, modeled, or controlled.

Alice Bucknell is an artist, writer, and educator based in Los Angeles. Their work explores the affective dimensions of video games as interfaces for understanding complex systems, relationships, and forms of knowledge. Bucknell is generally interested in the limits of scientific knowledge and systems thinking, the weird possibilities of play, and play as an embodied technology. They have exhibited internationally, including at Centre Pompidou (Paris), Kunsthalle Praha (Prague), Ars Electronica (Linz), transmediale (Berlin), Arcade Seoul, the Venice Architecture Biennale, the Singapore Art Museum and Serpentine Galleries (London). In 2025, their video game The Alluvials was acquired by SFMOMA, becoming the first video game in the museum's permanent collection. A 2025 recipient of the Creative Capital Award and a 2026 resident of La Becque Principal Residency Program in Switzerland, Bucknell teaches world-building, game design and philosophies of technology at SCI-Arc and UCLA (Los Angeles).