TONY GOLD

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Tony Gold is a Chicago-based multimedia artist, filmmaker, and creative producer whose work explores the intersection of interactive media, surveillance culture, and collective memory. His practice spans video games, immersive installations, and experimental film, often mining the detritus of late-capitalist entertainment for its unexamined anxieties.

His interactive installation AXTION CAPTAIN is a playable arcade video game cabinet outfitted with the visible apparatus of modern data extraction: cameras, biometric scanners, personality questionnaires, and real-time database lookups—all in a game designed for simple fun. The juxtaposition is the point. Every mobile game, streaming service, and social platform performs these same operations—we just can't see the wires. Gold's cabinet makes the transaction physical: the cameras are mounted, the questions interrupt gameplay, the data value is calculated and displayed. It's a diagram of what we've all agreed to, slowly and surely, in exchange for entertainment and cultural and social participation.

Gold has produced commercial campaigns for Samsung, Nintendo, McDonald's, and Skittles—experience that informs his critical examination of how brands colonize attention and extract value from audiences. He teaches in the School of Cinematic Arts at DePaul University, where his courses in commercial production, music videos, and capstone prepare future creators to enter an unsettling media landscape.

His ongoing project expands the DUELIN' FIREMEN! universe—a mythic video game he co-created in Chicago, following rival fire captains battling across an apocalyptic city, winning crowds through funk, dance, and psycho-bluegrass. It developed a cult following among collectors, punk historians, and lost media obsessives—its absurdist vision of spectacle, competition, and collapse feeling less like satire and more like prophecy. Gold is now building out that world through comics, immersive experiences, and interactive installations.