PATTY PODESTA

Runaways

Patty Podesta began as a talented video artist, who then succeeded as a Production Designer, working on a long list of impressive features, first with Gregg Araki and then later with others like Chris Nolan. Mark Harris and I got her to work with us on our video game called Runaways in the early 1990s while she was still going through this transition. While none of us had ever done an interactive production before, in many ways Patti was the most helpful. Although she was credited as an art director and production designer, she actually did much more: she was deeply involved in every aspect of production and was a great problem solver. She also found and dressed all the key spaces we used—including the bedroom of our teenage runaway and the office of The Searchers who help find her. Remembering how helpful she had been, I called on her again when preparing the exhibition space in the USC Fisher Gallery for our Interactive Frictions event. We had a piece by Bill Viola that needed some construction but the campus builders were too expensive and much too slow. She solved the problem by putting me in contact with someone from the movie business who built sets and tore them down. I called him that afternoon and by the following morning he was in the exhibition space with his materials and tools. We couldn’t have done it without Patty.