A platform, not a project. JoyGeo is a cloud-based, geo-locative system that lets anyone — not only programmers — build location-triggered games, stories, and binaural audio-augmented-reality experiences: Google Maps integration, authoring tools for non-programmers, any smartphone, any operating system.
Its origin is recursive. Warren built the platform in order to build Wellywood, his own binaural locative street game. When RJDJ withdrew the platform Wellywood depended on, the response was to build infrastructure no corporation could revoke — and the tool made to produce a single artwork became a tool for anyone to produce their own. The content became the platform. The local became the global.
Then the platform did what platforms in this practice always do: it kept morphing. JoyGeo entered New Zealand's first startup accelerator, where the art project became a startup and the startup became Promoki — a public-media collective advertising platform that let ordinary people earn from the messages they spread across their social networks, turning online promotion into a social game. It grew fast. In 2013, Facebook shut it down.
That arc — art project to platform to venture to platform-casualty — is the complete cycle the practice keeps enacting: the mycorrhizal movement from a single creative need to scaled infrastructure, and the platform-dependency trap met twice, first as victim, when RJDJ killed Wellywood, and then from the other side, as a venture operating at the scale where Facebook could end it.
The MFA thesis includes a fifteen-dimension comparative analysis against Mark Shepard's Tactical Sound Garden — competitive positioning standard in venture documents and essentially unheard of in MFA theses. The overlap between artistic argument and product pitch is the work's conceptual core.
