GTMO 441: Games, Detention, Power
Description
GTMO 441: Games, Detention, Power
A public sharing (IRL & online) of experimental playable media shaped by Mansoor Adayfi’s lived experience, developed in collaboration with Biome Collective and researchers from Abertay University and Mississippi State University.
Join us for a public sharing from a week-long, Creative Scotland-funded residency workshop developing a video game based on the experiences of Mansoor Adayfi, who was detained without charge at Guantánamo Bay for 14 years.
The evening will feature a presentation Mansoor Adayfi as well as the project team Antonio Aiello, Jenna Altomonte, Joseph DeLappe, Tom deMajo, Malath Abbas and Darshana Jayemanneas.
This early-stage residency explores how we might respond to life inside Guantánamo using experiential story telling, game design and playable media. The team is experimenting with ways to reflect how games, traditional, improvised, and digital, became tools of survival, resistance, and psychological escape under conditions of extreme confinement.
As Guantánamo continues to hold detainees, amid renewed proposals to expand detention operations there, GTMO 441 insists these stories remain urgent and unfinished.
The project is led by Biome Collective and supported by Abertay University researchers, working alongside Mansoor Adayfi, memoir co-writer Antonio Aiello, and an international team of scholars, artists, and technologists committed to work that is artistically innovative, ethically grounded, and emotionally resonant.
Starting at 5:30pm with experimental games to play followed by a few presentations, a panel discussion and live QA from 6pm. We'll have refreshments and we anticipate wrapping up between 7-7:30pm
Event Room details: https://rooms.abertay.ac.uk/1502
Link to join online from 17.30: https://teams.microsoft.com/meet/395954621034360?p=jRnuVDUMtd9PCMIleK
Lineup
Mansoor Adayfi (GTMO 441)
Mansoor Adayfi (GTMO 441) is a Yemeni author, artist, human rights advocate, and former Guantánamo detainee. Kidnapped at age 18 and sold to the United States, he spent 15 years held without charge or trial in CIA black sites and Guantánamo Bay as Detainee 441. His memoir Don't Forget Us Here: Lost and Found at Guantánamo, published by Hachette, was met with critical acclaim, with reviews in the New York Times, The Guardian, the Washington Post, and the Los Angeles Times. His writing has appeared in the New York Times, Al Jazeera, The Guardian, Middle East Monitor, and Common Dreams, among others. He is also the author of the audiobook Letters from Guantánamo, a collection of letters written in the voices of former detainees — the final testimony of men the world was told to forget. He serves as the Guantánamo Project Coordinator at CAGE International and co-founded the Guantánamo Survivors Fund alongside American lawyers and US-based NGOs. He leads campaigns to close Guantánamo Bay and demands accountability for crimes against humanity committed there and at CIA black sites.
Antonio Aiello
Antonio Aiello is a writer, editor, and storyteller. As former Content and Editorial Director at PEN America, he founded and edited the Illustrated PEN, PEN Ten Interviews, the PEN Poetry Series, and the translation magazine Glossolalia, and co-wrote the PEN America Handbook for Writers in Prison. His writing has appeared in the Los Angeles Times, LitHub, Electric Literature, and The Best American Nonrequired Reading, among others. He has collaborated with Mansoor Adayfi on multiple projects, including Don’t Forget Us Here, the Audible Original Letters from Guantánamo, named one of Audible’s Best Nonfiction titles of 2024, and the Sundance-supported television adaptation From Guantánamo, With Love, currently in development. He is a Sundance Institute Fellow in Episodic TV.
Jenna Altomonte
Jenna Altomonte is an Associate Professor of Art History at Mississippi State University. Her current research endeavors respond to contested, occupied, and conflicted spaces in the post-9/11 era. She is a recent Charles E. Scheidt Faculty Fellow in Atrocity Prevention through Binghamton University’s Institute for Genocide and Mass Atrocity Prevention and has published in journals like Public Art Dialogue, Urban Creativity Journal, Public Shere, The Public Historian Journal- and numerous edited volumes. She has also presented her research at national and international venues, including the University of Johannesburg, South Africa; University of Graz (Austria), University of Rennes, Nice-France; Education University of Hong Kong; Columbia University Middle East Research Center, Amman, Jordan; University of Rome Tor Vergata; National Library of Singapore, and the National University of Singapore; Doha Graduate Institute, Doha, Qatar; and Mansfield College, Oxford, England.
Secret Agent
The Cuban ground iguana/Cyclura nubila is lizard species in iguana family. It is the 2nd largest species & one of most endangered group of lizards. A 2022 iguana survey was completed which gave an approximate population. The objective of this project is to map the iguana population to get a more precise count of individuals living in Guantanamo.
Darshana Jayemanne
Darshana Jayemanne is the Reader in Digital Cultures at Abertay University, working within the Faculty of Design, Informatics and Business, specifically in the Department of Games and Arts. His research interests include performance in digital spaces, youth cultures, and internet studies. He has been involved as a jurist for the Independent Games Festival's Award for Narrative Excellence and as Principal Investigator on a report about loot boxes for the UK Department for Culture, Media, and Sport. Dr Jayemanne is currently a Co-Investigator for the CoSTAR National Laboratory and the GAME-ER Horizon Europe research project.
Tom deMajo
Tom deMajo is an artist, composer, and designer born in London (1974), living and working in Dundee, Scotland. His practice spans sound, interactive media, and immersive installation, re-examining cultural, sociological, and ecological relationships through technology and art. A founding partner and director of Biome Collective, he has led and contributed to work presented at Ars Electronica, V&A Dundee, Somerset House, and the London Design Biennale. Notable projects include Other, an award-winning sound game with National Theatre Scotland; Killbox, a BAFTA-nominated game about drone warfare made with Joseph DeLappe; and Garden, an ongoing interactive music and exploration work. He is artistic advisor to ArtEO and composes as one half of Warp Technique.
Malath Abbas
Malath Abbas is a game designer, artist and creative producer working on experimental and meaningful games and experiences in Scotland. Malath is a founding member of Biome Collective, a creative studio, community and digital space for people to create, collaborate and explore new frontiers in game design, digital art and technology. With over 10 years working in games and arts in Scotland, Malath has created a diverse portfolio of work and has exhibited internationally. Malath has a passion for the arts and has a track record of cross-disciplinary collaborative projects across sectors. Through close collaboration, partnership and workshop facilitation Malath has worked to demystify digital and games to diverse groups and settings.
Joseph DeLappe
Joseph DeLappe is an artist/activist and has been with electronic and new media since 1983. He is Professor of Games and Tactical Media at Abertay University. Works in online gaming performance, activist/political art, drawing, painting, participatory and social practice, sculpture, and electromechanical installation have been shown throughout the United States and abroad. He has developed works for venues such as Eyebeam Art and Technology in New York, The Guangdong Museum of Art, China and Transitio MX, Mexico City, among many others. In 2017 he was awarded a prestigious Guggenheim Fellowship in the Fine Arts.
Agenda
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