Isaque Sanches

Isaque Sanches is an ‘outsider artist’ focused primarily on ‘systemic art’ (aka. ‘systems art’) — ie. exploring subject-object relationships via rules, using audience interactivity as a means of self-reflection and empathy, capturing the subjectivity of systematic chaos, and the beauty of algorithmic and/or collective emergence.
He was born in Lausanne, Switzerland, spent his teenage years and most of his young adult life in Lisbon, Portugal, and lives in Helsinki, Finland.
His artistic path is somewhat unconventional: having worked both as a designer and as a programmer in the industrial and entertainment fields (ex: videogames, VR tools for cognitive science research, AR marketing experiences, etc), his journey into the arts began as a sort of double-life – in 2016 he rented his first atelier (gallery Todos, in Beato, Lisbon) where he’d go work at night and during weekends on his experiments, and share ideas and collaborate with fellow residents.
What started as a hobby had now become a need for self-expression, and after that, as he slowly networked with the wider community of avant-garde underground creatives in Lisbon, a need for community: to collaborate with others, join forces and become part of something bigger. That year, he founded notagamestudio, a collective for experimental arthouse games and other playthings.
In 2017, with the support of Lusófona University, in Lisbon, he created Misplay – a residency for ludic media, which had participants who traveled from all over Portugal. In 2018, he created an ‘arthouse’ hackathon which paired together Fine-Arts-trained creators (ex: painters and sculptors, etc) with new media creators (ex: ‘demoscene’ folk, experimental hardware ‘makers’, etc) in the Ponte de Lima Palace in Mafra, Portugal. In that same year, his work ‘de teclas na mao, sem saber o que fazer’ (translation: ‘a keyboard in my hands, unsure of what to do’) was featured at the Cerveira biennial, in Portugal.
In 2019 he co-created ‘Vale Tudo’ (translation: ‘everything is valid’) a residency for outsider and avant-garde artists at Oficinas do Convento, in Évora, Portugal. In 2020 he organized Ludoid, his first self-curated formal exhibition featuring his works, at the Mill Gallery in Lisbon, Portugal. In 2023 three of his works (‘lady in a bird mask’, ‘clt’, and ‘uranus’) were featured in the open expo of the A.Maze festival for playful media, in Berlin, Germany.
Meanwhile, during that time, and still to this day, his double-life-like career continued. He was an XR Senior Developer at Siemens, and his currently a Senior Game Designer at Ubisoft. By day, he creates tools: things to be used; things for users; things that make rational, pragmatic sense. By night he makes things that challenge reason, and exist for their own sake; things that go beyond the senses and are meant to live inside the audience’s head; to be slowly digested via thought. Things that, by their very nature, when interacted with by people, leave an impact on them, interact back, and create a feedback loop.
He believes that encouraging subjectivity in media is both a celebration of plurality and individuality; and therefore, that interactivity is the most Humanistic artform that ever was.