In this exclusive interview, AustraliaN artist Georgie Roxby Smith discussES her practice with games and new media.
Born in 1976 in Melbourne, Australia, 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 - her 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, New York, 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. She lives and works in Melbourne, Australia.
Georgie Roxby Smith's artwork 99 Problems [WASTED] is currently on display in the RECORD level of GAME VIDEO/ART. A SURVEY.
This interview was produced by the students of Master's Degree Program in Arts, Markets and Cultural Heritage at IULM.
GVA: Can you briefly describe your education?
Georgie Roxby Smith: After finishing secondary school I studied Media Arts, specializing in animation and sound art before I returned to study at the University of Melbourne, Faculty of the Victorian College of the Arts as a postgraduate student. I completed a Master’s of Contemporary Art and then Master’s of Fine Art (by research) specializing in mixed reality, idealized selves, and how we role-play the self online.
GVA: Can you name some influences - not necessarily artistic ones - that played a key role in your evolution as an artist?
Georgie Roxby Smith: When I started working in the digital medium, it was not a big scene here in Australia yet, so meeting digital artists IRL at the Watermill Center in New York and travelling to Nevada to take part in Perspectives International Festival of Digital Art curated by game art pioneer Joseph De Lappe was an incredible experience. Meeting and working with my digital peers from across the globe in the one space for the first time (a number of whom I later brought together for a group show here in Melbourne “New Media Art NOW” in 2013) was pivotal. Having curators like Matteo Bittanti bringing together artists and creating a virtual gallery and discussion space through his GameScenes blog continues to be a great inspiration.
GVA: When and why did you begin using video games in your practice?
Georgie Roxby Smith: I had been working with virtual worlds and materiality in my studio research during my Master’s but the more I delved into the work, the more it became about the self, role play, and how we perform online. I began experimenting with interventions, glitches and the insertion of ‘the other” into the virtual norm. Rediscovering the video game landscape in 2012 after years away (which may as well be eons in video game world!) was a key moment in my practice. Immersing myself as audience/player, the possibilities of the medium and my concerns with gaming culture (both onscreen and off) emerged and the work generated itself naturally out of those provocations.
Georgie Roxby Smith, The Fall Girl, machinima, 2012, 08' 57"
"Placed as prop, non player, damsel in distress or sub-hero, the gaming female character is rarely a ‘player’ of any importance. Where female character heroes are in place, they are often overtly sexualized, such as the hyper real soft pornography of Lara Croft’s female form. The male gaze manifests itself bi-fold in an immersive environment populated by young men invested in hours of play and character’s own digital peers.The Fall Girl is a recreated death glitch which occurred whilst playing Skyrim. This death loop magnifies and distorts the violence against the female body and, in its relentlessness, begins to blur between the lines between intention - suicide, murder, accident or perpetual punishment. By removing the game play in between scenes, which when isolated are disturbing in their sharp focus, the viewer becomes critically aware of the hyper- representation of the character and the violence enacted against her. The protagonist is eternally and perpetually punished in an inescapable digital loop." (Georgie Roxby Smith, 2012)
GVA: Digital games often create parallel, alternative experiences for its users. How do you relate to the complex relation between reality and simulation? How do you address this tension through your work?
Georgie Roxby Smith: As technology advances, we are increasingly living in multiple realities at once. For a long time we have had one hand in the digital and the other in the real but it’s the slippage in between that has always interested me – how much we invest in our virtual selves and avatars, the physical and neurological connections between us and “it”, mirrored and glitched real and virtual environments. My installation work Reality Bytes attempted to address this by layering multiple realities, audiences and performances in a myriad of spaces in one time. Since then it has been a process of stripping back and isolating those moments and experiences. The tensions vary with each work – viewers know the protagonist is a “bunch of pixels” yet by repeating and looping acts of violence, as in 99 Problems [WASTED] for example, I create an unease in the viewer. In this work, the viewer's discomfort is amplified by injecting a juxtaposition of humor and a rhythmic soundtrack, courtesy of the suicide gun, that carries the viewer almost jauntily through the work.
GVA: The creative opportunities afforded by machinima are greatly constrained by existing copyright law, which prohibits many possible uses, including commercial purposes. What’s your take on the paradoxical nature of this art form?
Georgie Roxby Smith: I’m not overly concerned with machinimas limitations as I am not driven by commerciality, rather the best medium to convey the work’s concept – and in this case the concept is embedded in the medium itself.
Georgie Roxby Smith, Uncomposed (after Titian after Giorgione), 2012, 05' 03" (low resolution preview)
"A self portrait of the artist, Uncomposed (after Titian after Giogione) deconstructs Giorgione’s Sleeping Venus, itself a composite, the landscape and sky being completed by Titian following Giogione’s death in 1510. The work was a landmark of its era, reflecting a new shift in modern art with the inclusion of a female nude at its centre. Employing three-dimensional computer graphics and elements of Giorgione’s original masterpiece, Roxby Smith replaces his stylised renaissance figure with a fantasised digital body transplanted into an augmented hyper real landscape. In the likeness of her present day artist, the 21st Century Venus will not lie still for her voyeurs, obstinately returning the male gaze from her new digital paradigm, Sleeping Venus awakes. Soundtrack owco2_introspection by +" (Georgie Roxby Smith, 2012)
GVA: Do you agree that machinima has democratized the art making process? Has it lowered the entry barrier for creators of video art, as some critics argue?
Georgie Roxby Smith: As a contemporary artist, I value concept and aesthetic equally, I don’t necessarily relate the majority of machinima with art making. That argument could be (and was) just as easily applied to the photography/painting debate. I don’t think artists and critics should be elitist about the medium – if the medium is the best vehicle for the work, the importance should be placed on the work being executed well both in thought and materiality.
GVA: How do video game aesthetics affect the overall impact of your work? What comes first, the concept or the medium?
Georgie Roxby Smith: For me, immersive and critical play generates the concept. That said my new body of work is sculpturally based, concept definitely lead in that case.
Georgie Roxby Smith, Lara Croft, Domestic Goddess I & II Lara Croft, 2013, variable length
"The legendary Lara Croft has is an icon in the representation of females in gaming – and for the first time in 2013 was re-imagined by a female writer, deeply conscious of finding a balance between “a man with boobs” and exploring areas of the female psyche without overly feminizing the character. Whilst the body is less overtly sexualised than previous versions of Lara, and her vulnerability is a strength of her character’s development rather than a victimization – the incredibly violent and voyeuristic death scenes are unparalleled. In a tongue-in-cheek play on the stereotypical depiction of Lara, the career woman of action adventure gaming,our heroine is re-positioned her as “domestic goddess” - but rather than balancing the media hyped “career, children, husband, home” - her flipside manages her domestic chores alongside her “work” as sex symbol and “bad guy getter”. The death sounds become her cries of distress in her entrapment or the ironic orgasmic ecstasies of the home." (Goergie Roxby Smith, 2013)