Mixing Realities, A Consciousness of Mud

Western literature, architecture and game forms tend to focus on the story of a person against the backdrop of the world—the Rückenfigur, the third-person perspective, first-person shooter, the hero, the ego, the genius, the master, the architect, the individual. In this figure-ground relation, the nonhuman world is also banished to the background. As a reparative and realist (but non-redemptive) form, Multiplayer Mixed Reality, ‘Mixed Presence’ Game Simulations and Interactions create nonnormative timeframes and interconnected systems without a singular protagonist and moral.

The work of Leah Wulfman develops nonnormative uses and playful misuses of technology through embodied physicality. Much of this work is centered around play and performativity, and pairs game engine interactions and digital twins with their most physical, material and ludic counterparts–dirt, weeds, trash, plastic and foam. These mixed reality ecologies and interactions find their foundations in disability, trans and queer embodied practice and politics, and operate as lenses to reconfigure and recontextualize space and time orientations in architectural discourse beyond the normative.

About Leah Wulfman

Leah Wulfman is a Carrier Bag architect, educator, game designer, digital puppeteer, and occasional writer. Trained as an architect, Wulfman assembles hybrid virtual and physical spaces in order to prototype new relationships to technology and nature, as well as challenge normative ideologies so often reinforced by technology and architecture. In addition to mixed reality installations that play with and emphasize the physical, material basis of everything digital, their research focuses on gamified environments, interactions and materials.

Wulfman holds a Bachelors of Architecture degree from Carnegie Mellon University and a Masters of Arts in Fiction and Entertainment from SCI-Arc. They have taught at numerous institutions in the United States, including ArtCenter’s Media Design Practices Graduate Program, IDEAS Program at UCLA Architecture and Urban Design, SCI-Arc, The School of Architecture at Taliesin, and most recently University of Michigan’s Taubman College of Architecture and Urban Planning, where they have developed youth programming and mixed reality coursework. Their research and design work has been supported by numerous residencies and publications, and has been shown as part of various exhibitions and festivals, including the Buenos Aires Architecture Biennale, After School, The FiDi Arsenale, Space Saloon Design and Build Festival, Open Engagement, VIA Festival for Electronic Art and Music, A Queer Query, /imagine: A Journey into the New Virtual, and The Wrong Biennale for New Digital Art. They currently teach at the University of Utah as a Visiting Assistant Professor in the Division of Multi-Disciplinary Design (MDD). Wulfman is a recipient of the 2024 Architectural League Prize for Young Architects + Designers, and the 2025 United States Artists (USA) Fellowship.