Sophie Rogers is a London-based artist whose practice incorporates 3D digital rendering, game engines, sound, and lo-fi electronics to produce video works and installations.
Her work blends CGI animation with sound to create atmospheric environments that evoke the emotional resonances of video game worlds. Rogers is interested in the potential of virtual world-building as a tool for narrative and critical imagination, with her research anchored in science fiction, game theory, cultural affect theory, and ecological theory. Her work departs from real-world moments of entanglement in which traditional distinctions among nature, technology, and the human collapse into one another. These overlaps, visible through mushrooms decomposing radioactive waste, sharks severing deep-sea internet cables, and the alteration of human biology through discrete technologies or microplastics, are treated as symptoms of contemporary ecological conditions and the starting point for speculative world-building.
These concerns converge in her current practice around questions of deep time, ecological damage, and survival. Drawing on the work of Anna Tsing and Donna Haraway, Rogers investigates natural examples of persistence and collaboration in ruined environments. She focuses on organisms that live with toxicity rather than despite it, adapting through symbiotic relationships rather than restoration. Her work approaches catastrophe not as an endpoint but as an ongoing temporal condition. Critically engaging with existing media representations of disaster, she constructs game worlds and video environments in which hybrid organisms - synthetic, organic, and at times seemingly human - inhabit the aftermath of ecological and atomic violence. Within these spaces, the logic of traditional gameplay is inverted: agency is partial, control is decentred, and mechanics of attunement replace extraction as the primary mode of engagement.
An earlier body of work examined the emotional and ideological mediation of technology, considering how geopolitical realities are neutralised through sentimental narrative, specifically the 'Disneyfication' of space exploration and its colonial dimensions. This critical investigation, in the form of an experimental opera, explored how narratives are constructed through technological systems via affect and fiction.
Central to her practice is an understanding of game engines not as a neutral medium but as a paradoxical space. While worlds can be imagined and built, they are bound by predetermined parameters and complex histories rooted in military development. Game engines contain qualities of our empirical world, featuring embedded gravity, atmospheric systems, geolocation, and material properties. Software's empty spaces are thus structurally encoded with the rules of the physical world. Rogers works within and against these parameters, finding slippages between the software's intended and unintended behaviours. Informed by Fredric Jameson's concept of 'world reduction' - the construction of fictional worlds through radical abstraction associated with writers such as Ursula K. Le Guin - Rogers uses apparent scarcity and emptiness as conditions for attention and empathy rather than absence. What remains when a world is stripped back becomes reconfigured, creating a platform for connection and re-imagining.