IN THIS EXCLUSIVE INTERVIEW, AUSTRALIAN ARTIST CHRIS HOWLETT DESCRIBES HIS FASCINATION FOR SLAVOJ ZIZEK, SIMCITY AS A SIMULATOR OF SOCIAL CONTROL, AND HIS EARLY YEARS IN PAPUA NEW GUINEA.
Chris Howlett (b. 1974, Kokopo, Papua, New Guinea) graduated with a MFA from the Californian Institute of the Arts in 2000. His works have been exhibited internationally in festivals including GAMERZ in Marseille, 16 France, Inter-Society of Electronic Arts in Helsinki, Finland and Stockholm, Videoholica International Video Art Festival in Bulgari, Los Angeles Freewaves Festival of Film, Video and New Media and exhibited work at the Art Centre College of Design in Pasadena, California. His solo and collaborative works have also been exhibited locally at the Gallery of Modern Art, Institute of Modern Art, the QUT Art Museum, The Arc Biennial for Art & Design and interstate at the Contemporary Art Centre of South Australia, Hobart Art Gallery, Cairns Contemporary Art Space and Blindside Artist Run Space in Melbourne. His public art commissions include “KICK OFF” which was a curated screen-based program at the new Metricon Stadium Homeground of the Gold Coast Suns and Australia’s largest public art canvas the QUT billboard project. In 2012, he was part of the DJ Culture: Contemporary Australian Video Art, screening in the Cinémathèque at Gallery of Modern Art and in 2013 underwent a residency in Armenia at Tumo – center for creative technologies where he completed a series of Alternate Reality Games called ARGARMENIA. He currently lives and works in Brisbane, Queensland.
Chris Howlett's Metropolis I-III is currently on display in the ASSEMBLAGE 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?
My university education began in the early nineties in the Applied Sciences in Australia at QUT (Queensland University of Technology) in Brisbane, but I quickly realized that the educational structure of the sciences was not suited to my personality or my desire to think creatively. I deliberately failed all of my exams in the first semester and was essentially kicked out of university to reassess what my future would be. The following year in 1992, I reapplied to QUT to undergo a Bachelor of Visual Arts and never looked back.
After completing my Honours year in 1996 I took off a year and went travelling throughout Europe. While I was overseas, I learnt that I was awarded a Samstag scholarship to undergo an Masters of Fine Arts (MFA) at The California Institute for the Arts (CalArts) from 1998 – 2000. When I completed my time at CalArts I wanted to take at least ten years outside of any educational institution to work on my art practice. Now I have come full circle by returning to begin a PhD (Doctor in Philosophy) back at QUT where I initially began my art degree.
GVA: Can you name some influences - not necessarily artistic ones - that played a key role in your evolution as an artist?
Many of my direct and immediate influences come from the contemporary art world, but there are many different writers who come from diverse fields such as cultural theory, art history, art criticism and curatorial practice who I would all conflate with my understanding of artistic influence, since they are read and experienced in conjunction with my artistic decision making. But if I have to choose a non-artistic influence it would come from a deeply personal and experiential space.
Some of my formative years of growing up were in Papua New Guinea on an island called Kavieng. Here my family literally lived next to the beach and a coral reef which was on the grounds of a local high school where my father was the Headmaster.
Growing up in this idyllic environment and non-european culture as a nine year old allowed me to experience and generate many different forms of self-ascribed knowledge. Some of these include what it meant to explore, to play, to be alone, to discover, to understand what a sense of freedom could look and feel like in nature, the dangers that also come along with it and to understand that how you think, look and behave can have an influence on those around you, who behave and understand the world quite differently from your own perception of it.
One of the dominant, and often romantic clichés that is used to describe artists is that they are “outsiders”. Although I don’t agree with this entirely, there is always an element of truth that is embedded in the cliché. As an artist, those early formative years abroad helped me to look objectively at my surroundings, to value play and openness, to be curious and to question what my purpose was in being there. I still think today that these processes influence my artistic decision making and the subject-matter I research.
GVA: When and why did you begin using video games in your practice?
After completing my MFA in 2000 a number of my friends from CalArts began a project space called C-level in downtown Chinatown which was a co-operative lab that shared technology and resources. It also developed and ran projects which had a bent towards new media, that could take the form of performances, screenings, lectures, debates or even tournaments and video games was just one of the mediums they collaboratively employed.
Although I was not directly involved in the space when it was initially set up, apart from cleaning out the space in the beginning, being around those involved, living with some of them and participating in their events had an impact on my thinking around material choice and medium.
I began using video games in my practice in the early noughties (2000s) after I returned to Australia from Los Angeles. Later on, video games just became another material to use and in the noughties it seemed that the prices of games and personal computers in Australia became cheaper to purchase. By this stage my technical expertise had developed to such an extent that I could actually use software and modding tools to create screen works from digital games.
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?
For me, I think it always comes back to the agency attributed to attaching alternate histories and personal narratives over the top of the prescribed structure of the game narrative and physics. I’m also drawn to online communities that form around specific games and the modding tools that arise out of the forums and discussion boards, and how interstitial spaces open up where players develop software programs to mod(ify) aspects of the game physics or game play. This in turn is distributed freely to other players who publically suggest further modifications to the original code which gradually gets updated and evolves into something new and unexpected. This is a very interesting form of collaboration where user generated software and expertise start to direct and take control of the desires of the gamers in order to force unforeseen environmental outcomes for the actual game.
It’s a complicated situation because game developers and corporations also know that this is to be expected from particular online communities who form around certain games. This comes back to then thinking about the perceived subversiveness reserved for processes behind the production of machinima and the choices artists make in the final production of the work.
Chris Howlett, Human Vs. Human 2009, 1-channel, SD, PAL, Stereo. Edition of 5 + 2AP, Duration: 20:15mins
"Human Vs Human is a Machinima film which uses various autobiographical war veteran stories from online social networking sites, live recorded 3D game play from first person shooter games and and remixed pop songs from all male pop groups to create alternative narratives which subvert and intensify their original meaning. The video work inserts the real life personal narratives of soldiers into a virtual gaming world cut with pop music, in-game narratives and atmospheric sound tracks to create a disturbing, conflated look at the reality of warfare, its simulated double and the psychology of masculine violence and seduction." (Chris Howlett)
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?
It’s hard to describe this in such a short passage of text since there are so many facets to the answer, but if I could focus on one idea it would be a partial quote by Žižek from his book called The Pervert’s Guide to Cinema where, I think, he is talking about Alfred Hitchcock’s film The Birds and he says, “...when our space within the symbolic order is disturbed our reality disintegrates”. The cross overs in how we understand our relationship to reality and its bed partner, simulation, have the potential to behave in a similar way.
I often think about this when I revisit my experiences playing the game called Heavy Rain where you alternate between different game characters of different age, class, gender and subjectivities to solve a crime in order to save a kidnapped boy from certain doom. Throughout the game as you search and make narrative choices based on your own moral and ethical positions the boy is gradually drowned in a stormwater drain by the rain as its falls heavier and heavier across the city.
One of the disturbing scenes that you get caught up in as a player is a simulated home invasion involving one of the female game characters when your are in her role. Her name is Madison Paige who suffers from insomnia. During one of the scenes that is staged in her apartment, you help her shower in her bathroom by pushing the controller buttons to dry herself off with her towel in a very intimate and revealing way (yet another form of home invasion). She walks to her bed and is about to fall asleep in her underwear and tank top when suddenly, she hears a sound from the kitchen. The fridge door is ajar; she closes it and someone is hiding behind her in the apartment.
The intruder is a masked man in black wearing a balaclava who proceeds to attack her, choke her, tackle her to the ground, tries to knife her, as both she and you struggles with the man and his knife a second masked man appears from nowhere and the panic starts to set in – you’re not going to survive this. This simulated rape/abduction/murder scene took me totally by surprise. All of the object pronouns such as me, you, I, her, or us that generally have a clear and defined meaning became unimportant in those moments of traumatic struggle in fighting for one’s life, both ingame and out.
It was an incredibly disturbing scene with a sophisticated pre-setup by the game developers who manipulated the players own voyeuristic impulses beforehand, firstly by interactively representing the intimate relationship that can be shared between a player and their avatar, whom they have a degree of agency over and secondly, using their own sense of shared vulnerability and identification with the character. It was a great lesson in reminding us that virtual or filmic space is not a simple mirror reflecting information about ourselves back to us but an extension of that same reality.
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 artform?
As an artist I don’t worry too much about this issue of copyright, I mean I still think about some of Duchamp’s assisted ready-mades of 1919, a work called L.H.O.O.Q. where he took a reproduction of the Leonardo Da Vinci’s Mona Lisa and drew a moustache and beard on her in pencil. Machinima is just doing the same thing. It’s now in a contemporary digital setting; nothing has dramatically changed in terms of the procedure, except in the dramatic increases in power and influence that corporations can wield over private and public space – they’ve just got stronger as we’ve grown weaker.
Chris Howlett, Michael Jackson 4 ways: Part I-IV 2009, 1-channel, HD, PAL, Stereo. Ed. of 5 + 2AP, Duration: 32:28mins
"Michael Jackson 4 Ways: Part I-IV is a machinima film designed to activate an immersive space from which to critically and creatively consider how reality and simulated environments both construct and reconfigure our ideas about the nature of subjectivity and identity. The video work explores these new phenomenons through Sims 3, which is a strategic life simulation video game where players construct and control their Sims in various social activities and form relationships in a manner similar to real life. Sims 3 does not have a defined final goal and its gameplay is open-ended. Michael Jackson was a person who cut across international racial and gender divisions with his music and lyrics, but whose personal life created intense contradictions between his private life and his role as a musician. As the copies of the Michael Jackson Sims play out their animated roles in Paris Hilton's house, the accompanying audio tracks expose the political and moral debates surrounding accusations of paedophilia. "Michael Jackson 4 Ways: Part I-IV" questions the slippery position the viewer inhabits, to make informed, truth based decisions over these personal and moral online statements. Where does one locate one's moral and ethical decisions based on the artists aesthetics?" (Chris Howlett)
GVA: Would 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?
I would not agree with the idea that machinima has democratised the processes of art making, because the question already assumes that all machinima is art. The problem is that not all machinima is video art because most of the producers of it are not concerned with contextualising it as video art or even care about the history of art which has everything to do with whether or not it's art or not, just like music videos are not video art because they belong to a sub-genre of music. Adding to the problem is that there are also curators, gallery dealers, collectors and artists who don’t consider machinima as video art even if you’ve invested your whole life in framing your practice in terms of contemporary art. I think I would describe its processes quite closely to how Rancière characterises politics and aesthetics as forms of dissensus. It forms a dissensual relationship to the processes of art creation and the institutionalisation of those processes which lead to one naming it as art. This is probably what continually makes it interesting and dynamic for me because it can cut across different hierarchies and sub-cultures, move between discourses and genres (both low and high) which seem incompatible, and yet it can also disrupt and re-orientate perceptual space because of the alternative narratives generated out of a highly controlled and corporatised space. I just feel that there is no consensual agreement as to the framing of it as a particular genre, therefore you can’t bring an idea like democracy into the mix.
Chris Howlett, Bushstalkers, 2012
"Bushstalkers" was a Two Player Interactive Game Mod which used the UT3 game engine to create a giant fantasy forest where two players could explore aimlessly without the capability to shoot their guns. Their only guide was a series of coloured spotlights which pooled up as the players walked into their vicinity, each triggering a personal story from war veterans returning from Iraq. Their stories contained personal, ideological, moral and ethical narratives which complicated the viewers conception of empiracle truth based observations set against the backdrop of a corporate, media driven landscape, and the way we inhabit a particular set of subjective positions. All of the stories were sourced and recorded from online social networks, blogs, websites and news channels. For more information please got to >> http://www.chrishowlett.com.au/flashbacks-metroarts/" (Chris Howlett)