Monday July 20 – Thursday July 23, 10:30pm PT
YES: Maggie Hazen, Georgie Roxby Smith, Brent Watanabe
Q&A with the artists via live chat at 8:30pm ET
Microscope is very pleased to present another edition of our emerging artist series YES with an online screening of works by Maggie Hazen, Georgie Roxby Smith, and Brent Watanabe.
The program focuses on works that interfere with, alter, or otherwise intervene within the fixed and scripted structure of action-adventure video games. Popular titles familiar to non-gamer audiences as well, such as Grand Theft Auto V (GTA V), Call of Duty, Tomb Raider, and The Incredible Hulk, are reinterpreted by the artists to highlight the representation of gender in virtual reality, as well as the abstracted and subdued depictions of violence with their ramifications in real life, and the possibilities for more human and empathetic gaming models.
In the video “HULK,” Maggie Hazen further extends the choice of avatars traditionally offered by the game Grand Theft Auto V – Incredible Hulk Mod, by inserting herself, through the use of green screen, into the helicopters or cars that Hulk destroys. Similarly, in her work “Call of the Lily,” she replaces the first-person shooter’s gun in the game Call of Duty with a bouquet of tiger-lily flowers, shifting the win-the-conflict compulsion of the game into a more profound anti-war and anti-gun violence tribute. The two-channel video “Jump Gun” presents individuals equipped with military gear from GTA V next to a real-life recording of a military operation in Baghdad. The latter is carried out with the lightheartedness of a simulation, despite the real lives lost.
Through an intervention in Second Life, Georgie Roxby Smith manages to deflate the toughness and erotic appeal of Tomb Raider’s female protagonist Lara Croft by re-contextualizing her 3D avatar within a home laundry room, busy with hand washing and ironing activities. By reframing the heroine as a “domestic goddess,” the artist comments on the stereotypical portrayal of femininity in video games. In “Peacekeeper [War Games],” named after the latest gun available in Call of Duty, Smith culls video clips from Youtube made by teenagers role-playing the game, effectively transposing it into real life.
In “Possessions,” Brent Watanabe playfully references the personified animals in fables by forcing human body movement and voice programming onto animal avatars from Grand Theft Auto V, in an attempt of “anthropomorphism gone very, very wrong.” Watanabe’s “San Andreas Streaming Deer Cam” and “San Andreas Community Cam” are video captures of the infinitely generating outcomes of his code modifications of Grand Theft Auto V, in which deers or people are reprogrammed to simply “be themselves,”without any particular direction. A game devoid of end goal in which the point of view follows characters in enigmatic endeavors freed from their previously scripted functions, turns the viewer into a witness of a purely virtual existence, animal or human. If life is a game, here a game reaches the status of life.
Hazen, Smith, and Watanabe will be available for a Q&A with the online audience via live chat at 8:30pm ET.
TO WATCH:
A “WATCH NOW” link will become available on this page on Monday July 20 at 7pm. Passes for viewing can be purchased then, giving full access to the video program and live chat.General admission $8 (Valid through Thursday July 23, 10:30pm ET)
Member admission $6 (Valid through Thursday July 23, 10:30pm ET)
_
Maggie Hazen is a New York based interdisciplinary artist from Los Angeles and is also the Co-founder and Director of the Juvenile Justice Digital Arts Project (JJ-DAP). Her work explores themes of resistance in a cinematically real world of violence through a combination of moving image, sculpture and performance. Her forthcoming exhibitions will be at The Bronx Museum in New York and Vox Populi in Philadelphia. She has exhibited, screened and performed works at Pulse Miami Beach as part of Pulse Play; The Museum of Tolerance, Los Angeles, CA; Microscope Gallery, Brooklyn, NY; Light Year on the Manhattan Bridge; The Granoff Center, Brown University; Performance Works Northwest. Portland, OR; CICA Museum, South Korea; Holland Projects, Reno NV; Icebox Projects, Philadelphia, PA; and The Boston Young Contemporaries, Boston, MA, among others. She is a current resident at Pioneer Works, NY and has had residencies and fellowships at The Bronx Museum; The Shanghai Institute of Visual Art; The Saas-Fee Summer Institute of Art, European Graduate School, Switzerland; I:O at the Helikon Art Center in Turkey; Vermont Studio Center; and The Pasadena Side Street Projects, CA. She holds a BFA in sculpture from Biola University and an MFA in sculpture from Rhode Island School of Design and has taught at New York University, The Stevens Institute of Technology, The Shanghai Institute of Visual Art and is currently a professor at Bard College in Studio Arts.
Georgie Roxby Smith works across a range of disciplines exploring new pathways between virtual and physical worlds. Employing a variety of tools — including 3D graphics, live performance, shared virtual and gaming spaces, installation and projection — these works explore the increasingly blurred border between identity, materiality, reality, virtuality and fantasy in contemporary culture. In 2010 Georgie was selected for The Watermill Center Spring Residency Program, NY, by an international selection committee of cultural leaders including Marina Abramović, Alanna Heiss & Robert Wilson. In 2011 Georgie completed her MFA at the Victorian College of the Arts in Melbourne. Since 2012 Georgie has been focusing on gender representation and violence in video games, particularly that directed towards women on screen and in online communities. Smith has exhibited extensively both nationally and internationally including Art in Odd Places, New York, (where her work was featured in Time Out NY), Prospectives International Festival of Digital Art Nevada, Game Art Festival at Hammer Museum Los Angeles, Gamerz Festival (FR), Festival Miden (GR) and Generation i.2 – Aesthetics of the Digital in the 21st Century at Edith Russ Huas for Media Art (DE). Other highlights include curating and showing in NOW13:New Media Art Now, Substation Contemporary Art Prize and Self Help at Rawson Projects Brooklyn, curated by Jocelyn Miller (MoMa PS1). Most recently, in 2015, Georgie showed at Strafsachengalerie in Austria , QUT Art Museum, James Makin Gallery and Data Flow: Digital Influence at Town Hall Gallery in Melbourne. Awards and grants include the Australia Council of the Arts New Work, Artstart, Nellie Castan Award, Australian Postgraduate Award, Ian Potter Cultural Trust, Dame Joan Sutherland Fund and the Eldon and Anne Foote Trust Travel Grant.
Brent Watanabe is an artist combining a background in traditional materials and practices (drawing, sculpture) with emerging technologies (computer programming, electronics), exploring an artistic field still being defined and discovered. Since 2006, he has been creating computer controlled installations and experiments driven by an obsession with systems that regulate themselves. They are slapstick tragicomedies that have featured an animatronic crow streaming itself live on YouTube, a pneumatic cat attacking holographic rodents, and an open world video game played on acrylic paintings (and the surrounding wall and floor). One of his recent projects, San Andreas Deer Cam (2016), was presented live on the Internet, had over 800,000 visitors in the first three months, and was written about in dozens of publications, including New York Magazine, the BBC, and WIRED. Watanabe is a three time MacDowell Colony fellow (2011, 2013, 2016), and among his awards and residencies has received an Artist Fellowship from Artist Trust Foundation (2011), the Catherine Boettcher fellowship from MacDowell Colony (2012), and a“Visions of the U.S.”award from American Film Institute (1997). He has participated in numerous group shows and screenings nationally and internationally, most recently at NEoN Digital Arts Festival (Dundee, Scotland, 2016), and NTT InterCommunication Center (Tokyo, Japan, 2018-19). Watanabe has had solo exhibitions at Jack Straw New Media Gallery (Seattle, WA, 2009), Gallery 4Culture (Seattle, WA, 2011), Anchor Art Space (Anacortes, WA, 2013), and Bumbershoot Music and Arts Festival (Seattle, 2016).
Program:
Call of the Lily_02
By Maggie Hazen, single-channel video, 2019, 1 minute 45 seconds
Video footage is sourced from the video game “Call of Duty.” A bouquet of tiger-lily flowers is green screen into the video game, replacing what would be a first-person-shooter avatar gun.
Jump Gun
By Maggie Hazen, two-channel video, 2018, 5 minutes 25 seconds
RIGHT VIDEO: Audio and text released by Wikileaks from the July 12, 2007 US Military Apache AH-64 helicopter attack on a public square in Baghdad. Innocent Reuters journalist Namir Noor-Elden and her driver Saeed Chmagh are shot and killed by the American pilots. After the initial shooting, a minivan full of innocent adults and children drove into the square and were fired upon as well.
LEFT VIDEO: Youtube footage from the video game “Grand Theft Auto” of avatars selecting military outfits.
HULK
By Maggie Hazen, single-channel video, 2014, 3 minutes 28 seconds
A video where I green-screened myself as a live avatar into the video game “Grand Theft Auto” and fought the Incredible Hulk.
99 problems [WASTED]
By Georgie Roxby Smith, single-channel video, 2014, 4 minutes 45 seconds
Violence is claimed and turned on itself by the female protagonist in 99 Problems [WASTED] in a dualistic moment of empowerment and defeat. The action of ‘playing to win’ is neutralized as she ritualistically performs and re-performs her own violent suicide in front of disinterested players and characters. At once, an unheard digital cry for help against a wall of self-absorbed in-game characters, a martyr action of feminist protest against the treatment of her fellow female characters in gaming history and a claiming of her own death prior to her inevitable violent murder. Ultimately her quest is a futile one, not only is her action unregistered and unheard, her reverse gaming against her own survival is redundant, as in all gaming, in dying there is an automatic digital rebirth. There is no purgatory online, she is destined to be eternally punished in a digital hell. In repetition her hyper violence against self becomes hypnotic, darkly humorous and deeply disturbing.
Lara Croft, Domestic Goddess I & II
By Georgie Roxby Smith, single-channel video, 2013, 2 minutes 14 seconds
Georgie Roxby Smith’s hacked Lara Croft Tomb Raider video game shows the familiar icon for violent femme fatale bad-assery in the throes of orgasmic housekeeping, a scene that could be read as neo-Friedan, with her “domestic goddess” subject trapped between the banally physical and the extraordinarily virtual. While the medium is insistently technological, technology extrudes into the gallery space in a much more mundane and industrial sense, with the sculptural interjection of a washing machine as plinth, which also acts as an evocation of the sidelined, disenfranchised suburban female home warrior, who’s vehicle of satisfaction (sitting astride the vibrating machinery) is ironically the same technology that might shackle her. The value judgments are unclear, the equation destabilized, as Croft joyfully irons shirts with a bow and arrow slung over her back, letting out cries that are undiscernibly battle grunts or orgiastic moans. — Jocelyn Miller, Assistant Curator, MoMA PS1, NYC
Peacekeeper [War Games]
By Georgie Roxby Smith, single-channel video, 2013, 10 minutes 14 seconds
Georgie Roxby Smith’s series Peacekeeper (the title of which is taken from the latest gun available in the multiplayer game Call of Duty) explores the juxtaposition between reality and play and hyper masculinity and violence in virtual gaming and physical combat spaces through game interventions, installation, sound bytes and video collage. Peacekeeper [War Games] is a YouTube video collage of kids role-playing Call of Duty Multiplayer IRL (in real life).
Possessions
By Brent Watanabe, modified GTA V video game, 2018-19, 5 minutes 15 seconds
Fables featuring talking animals have a rich cultural history. These fables teach important lessons, while entertaining and imparting collective wisdom to the next generation. Think Aesop’s Fables, The Brothers Grimm, and the Bible. Anthropomorphic characters often share insight regarding relationships, morality, and collective fear through carefully crafted parable. Possessions is anthropomorphism gone very, very wrong. Possessions is the result of a force feeding of human animation and voice to animal avatars in Grand Theft Auto V.
San Andreas Community Cam
By Brent Watanabe, modified GTA V video game, 2017, 3 minutes 49 seconds
San Andreas Community Cam was a live video stream from a computer running a modded version of Grand Theft Auto V, hosted on Twitch.tv. The mod follows the citizens of San Andreas, a fictional state in GTA V based on California. The citizens are programmed to control themselves and make their own decisions, with no one actually playing the game. The citizens are “playing themselves,” with all activity unscripted. The website launched the morning of January 20, 2017 in response to the presidential inauguration, and was live for one week.
San Andreas Deer Cam
By Brent Watanabe, modified GTA V video game, 2016, 5 minutes 31 seconds
San Andreas Deer Cam was a live video stream from a computer running a modded version of Grand Theft Auto V, hosted on Twitch.tv. The mod created a deer avatar and followed it as it wandered throughout the 100 square miles of San Andreas, a fictional state in GTA V based on California. The deer was programmed to control itself and make its own decisions, with no one actually playing the video game. The deer was ‘playing itself’, with all activity unscripted. At various times of day, the deer wandered along a moonlit beach, caused a traffic jam on a major freeway, got caught in a gangland gun battle, and was chased by the police.
_
Microscope Gallery Event Series 2020 is sponsored, in part, by the Greater New York Arts Development Fund of the New York City Department of Cultural Affairs, administered by Brooklyn Arts Council (BAC).