Ezra J. Robinson is a creative producer and designer of immersive media.
I grew up in Seattle Washington, the child of an English professor and a performance art producer, both Jewish atheists. Most of my early years were spent in trouble for telling my classmates that Santa Claus was made up by big companies to sell more toys; the rest of the time I was inside cardboard boxes pretending they were spaceships. When I simultaneously discovered filmmaking and game design, they became the natural outlet for my critical energies and efforts to open the eyes of others to the lies of the world.
I now create content that aims to bring people together through scrutiny and towards transcendence. My short films, such as Fake News Real Blood (2017) and ASMR LoFi Vaporwave Beats To Cook To (2020), often involve characters escaping the stranglehold of popular media to achieve or fail at a political awakening. My projection installation work, like DRAPE (2020) and SEARCH(LIGHT) (2021), forms ephemeral boundaries, which force participants to question that which holds them. And my upcoming construction-comedy VR game, Detour Bus, with a grant from Oculus, uses accessible highway-building mechanics and the tropes of the road trip genre to interrogate how public works shape our imagined nation, as well as advocate against nostalgia and the privatization of infrastructure.