In this exclusive interview, American artist Angela Washko discusses her practice with video games.
Angela Washko (b. 1986) is a New York-based new media artist and facilitator whose work mobilizes communities and creates new forums for discussions of feminism where they do not exist. Washko has been creating performances inside the online video game World of Warcraft since 2012 in which she initiates discussions about feminism within the gameplay. She is the founder of the Council on Gender Sensitivity and Behavioral Awareness in World of Warcraft whose goal is to raise awareness and protest the sexist language from players in the game. In 2014, she wrote an essay about her findings in World of Warcraft, commissioned by Creative Time. She lives and works in Pittsburgh & New York City.
Angela Washko's three-channel installation Free Will Mode 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?
Angela Washko: I attended Tyler School of Art at Temple University in Philadelphia for my undergraduate degree. I received a BFA in Painting, Drawing & Sculpture. I also studied abroad at Temple University’s Rome Campus, focusing on art history and painting. I did my MFA at University of California, San Diego in a very interdisciplinary Visual Arts program. After graduating from UCSD, I taught at Bauhaus University in Weimar, Germany for a summer and am now a Visiting Assistant Professor at Carnegie Mellon University in Pittsburgh.
GVA: Can you name some influences - not necessarily artistic ones - that played a key role in your evolution as an artist?
Angela Washko: Writers like Chris Kraus, Elfriede Jelinek, Alice Walker, and Kathleen Blee have been very influential to me in thinking about the ways in which women’s experiences of the world are distinctly different from men… In terms of artists, I’ve been influenced by conceptual and performance artists like Sophie Calle, Coco Fusco, Dynasty Handbag/Jibz Cameron, Genesis Breyer P-Orridge and Lady Jaye Breyer P-Orridge, Kalup Linzy, Lynn Hershman Leeson, Michael Smith, Martha Rosler, Kristoffer Ørum & Anders Bojen. And then there are tactical media artists like The Yes Men, The Institute for Applied Autonomy, Electronic Disturbance Theater, Paper Tiger TV, Critical Art Ensemble. Additionally, I would like to mention architect/activists like Teddy Cruz and Laura Kurgan. So even though I am working with video games – I am coming from more of a performance, critical media theory and interventionist perspective than a game art or game criticism perspective perhaps.
Angela Washko, Heroines with Baggage, 2012,
"Heroines with Baggage is a video essay using footage taken directly from the snes Final Fantasy 3 (US)/6 (Japan). The video deconstructs the game by displaying the trajectories of 2 of the only 3 playable female characters..in a game with 14 playable characters. The sheer lack of female representation in the game is less surprising (far fewer females reportedly played video games in 1994 than today) than the way they are represented. Both characters mention their desires to experience love nearly every time they speak (unlike male characters that do not need to mention it at all), and are introduced with "fallen woman" baggage. Despite their strengths and the plot focus around them, the two characters always remain projections of archetypal powerful-yet-victimized women." (Angela Washko)
GVA: When and why did you begin using video games in your practice?
Angela Washko: In 2010, I started making videos from role playing games from my childhood. At first I just wanted to re-play them because they’d had such a big impact on my development. I wasn’t nearly as interested in movies and television – I mostly absorbed books and video games. So when I started replaying these games. I quickly realized how much I had been affected by the ways in which women were portrayed. Women in these games were often running scared, killed romantically for the sake of the emotional engagement of the assumed male player, emotionally damaged, weak, and often operating in support/healing classes or roles. I wanted to highlight that in my first game-based projects Heroines with Baggage and Her Longing Eyes.
Angela Washko, Her Longing Eyes, 2011- 2012
"Video As I revisit role playing games that were highly influential to me during my childhood, clear patterns emerge which make their impact on my understanding of romantic partnerships obvious. Her Longing Eyes is a study of a necessary requirement for female protagonists in Final Fantasy 6, Final Fantasy 7, Final Fantasy 8, Valkyrie Profile, and Final Fantasy 10 (games that I love/loved). These characters are displayed looking directly at male characters with the most ridiculous glazed over eyes, or they are displayed this way in a context in which they are meant to be thinking about/missing a male character. Male characters are portrayed as heroic, safely holding female characters or looking over them. Her Longing Eyes is an extension of my research project Heroines with Baggage- an ongoing project devoted to the study of the proliferation of gender-based stereotypes throughout the video games that I grew up playing and how the presence of these stereotypes has impacted my growth- especially in my expectations of love, tragedy, and the roles I take on in my adult relationships." (Angela Washko)
GVA: Why did you specifically choose a video game to make art? What do you find especially fascinating about this medium? Its interactivity? Agency? Aesthetics? Theatricality?
Angela Washko: I don’t use games for their aesthetics, although their strong aesthetics produce nostalgia in a lot of the viewers that look at the work – which is for me just a byproduct of working often with existing games made from 1993-2005. I am most interested in the cultural impact of games. In most of the works I make I am either looking at what stories games tell and how they coexist with other types of cultural storytelling (cinema, art, fiction etc.) and how those stories impact the development and thinking of those playing through them. In my project The Council on Gender Sensitivity and Behavioral Awareness in World of Warcraft, I focus on the community aspect of World of Warcraft. The emergence and popularity of massively multiplayer role playing games has created unique digital public gathering spaces, and I am interested in the informal behaviors, languages, social codes and other practices produced by the community participating in this space and how it has evolved over the ten+ years World of Warcraft has existed and thrived.
Performance by Angela Washko (The Council on Gender Sensitivity and Behavioral Awareness in World of Warcraft) tjat took place on December 8, 2012 at Gowanus Studio Space.
"I engage players in discussions about feminism instead of going on quests, getting better equipment, or fighting goblins." (Angela Washko)
Video documentation by Alex Young. Screen captures by Angela Washko.
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?
Angela Washko: I think of the community-oriented digital spaces I’m studying and participating in as extensions of lived experience at this point. I don’t think of them as “not real” as I think many may have discounted them in that way at first. At this point with ubiquitous computing and the pervasiveness of our digital lives coexisting with our physical ones beyond having to be stationary at a computer. I don’t see a tension so much anymore as a complete hazy white noise immersion in the digital world at all times. At least if you are a middle class western consumer who isn’t “opting out”?
6. 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 artform?
Angela Washko: My work facilitating discussions about participation, inclusivity, and communal language formation as The Council on Gender Sensitivity and Behavioral Awareness in World of Warcraft operates in opposition to rules of use stated by the End User License Agreement (EULA). But I think the work is important and I have been doing it for four years and haven’t been banned yet. I think copyright that protects people from having their works explicitly ripped off by others is important. However, copyright that prohibits artists from making work that is a commentary or reaction to mainstream cultural products is a blatant stretch/abuse of what copyright is supposed to protect. Once something because a part of public mainstream consciousness – it should be open to be responded to through artistic practices.
Angela Washko, Disposable Muses (Or: Your Turn Now, Fuckers), 2014 (part of Free Will Mode)
"Free Will Mode is a series of videos in which the artist uses The Sims to place human Artificial Intelligence into architectural situations which test the constraints of their ability to rethink the environments they've been placed in. Despite the absurdity of these built architectural anomalies, they expose a greater cultural phenomenon within people- the extent to which we accept the hand we've been dealt (architecturally, politically, socially, economically). When operating in free will mode, the AI in this strategic life simulation game eat when hungry, piss when necessary, sleep when tired, socialize when bored.....but they never alter the environment they've inherited, even if it kills them." (Angela Washko)