Tatiana Vilela dos Santos is an multi-award winning (Connext, A MAZE., EIGD ...) independent game designer and digital artist, based in Paris.
Born in Paris in 1989, she obtained two Bachelor degrees in game design from the private school ICAN and from the University of Montpellier 3. After video games, she studied visual arts in Montpellier, then obtained her Master's degree in Interactive Multimedia at the University of Paris 1 Panthéon-Sorbonne.
Since 2012, she creates playful installations and artistic games, as part of her interactive multimedia project MechBird. Most of her creations are alternative controller games: video games featuring tangible hand-crafted interfaces, built specifically for these experiences. Through these works, she tries to push the boundaries of the video game arts to go beyond the obvious in terms of interfaces by offering new experiences that do not rely on screens and standard gamepads. Her video game experiences are characterized by a strong anchoring in physical space and a spectacularization of the bodies at play.
Her first solo exhibit entitled "Beyond screens and joysticks", deployed for the first time in 2017 in Strasbourg, takes up several of her creations organized as alternative proposals to standard interfaces. In thsi exhibit, the interface presents itself as an object of constraint and power. By design, these devices will simultaneously control and augment the body of the players. Beyond this paradox of the controller, the exhibit approaches the playful gesture as a creative gesture. The game as a piece only exists when it is played. Several works consist in staging what emerges from the game rather than the game itself.
She also diverts, hacks and hijacks common new and retro technologies, to question their uses that have become so obvious today, by offering new playful interactions to this disenchanted ordinary objects.
Whether it is an alternative controller game or a virtual reality project, the work of Tatiana Vilela dos Santos tends to explore new territories of playfulness to re-enchant reality through digital technology.
