Jenna Caravello

Jenna Caravello is a Assistant Professor at UCLA, and also runs the UCLA games lab. Her main focus in work is game design, and interactive media arts. Being interested in the interactive space, she has extensively worked with VR, creating worlds, and various interactive art pieces through it. 

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Her work spans various different types of work. Her animation includes a film that I found fascinating called "frontier Wisdom". Even though, when she was talking, she only showed us a snippet of this film, but just that snippet made me want to go back and watch the entire film later. When i finally did watch the film, I thought it was fascinating. I thought the fact that she came up with this film, while driving through a road and a tunnel, was really cool. It proves that a story exists in everything, and inspiration ca n strike during the most mundane of times. 

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Even though I did find her animation work inspiring, and amazing to see, I thought her interactive work was also really cool to see. I specially loved her interactive piece "Amber Row". The story behind it was extremely moving. The way she tranferred grief and loss into her interactive piece was beautiful. The was she made it interactive was really interesting. She created her own gaming remote, with specific and limited controls. The way people must have interacted with it would have also been really interesting, because im sure every person using the remote, and exploring Jenna's world would have seen it differently. 

The way she showed grief through this interactive artwork, was based on the limitations of the work. I had never thought grief could be shown that way. 

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She created game remotes with limited options, but enough to keep the audience engaged. When she designed her remote, it had the main functions of a regular gamin remote, but seemed to be designed specific to her work, and specific to how she needed it. She then manufactured about 20 of these remotes to use. 

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Overall, I loved her work. Even though it was very different from my own work, I found it fascinating how games, or interactive artwork can portray a very unique and personal story. It gave me inspiration to maybe try or attempt putting my foot into the world of interactive media.