Angela Washko

The Game: The Game

August 27

through October 8, 2016

TRANSFER is pleased to present ‘The Game: The Game’ the gallery’s first solo exhibition with Angela Washko including a special soundtrack by Xiu Xiu.

‘The Game: The Game’ is an immersive installation and platform to experience the first chapter of a video game presenting the practices of several prominent seduction coaches (aka pick-up artists) through the format of a dating simulator. In the game these pick-up gurus attempt to seduce the player using their signature techniques taken verbatim from their instructional books and video materials.

Players explore the complexity of the construction of social behaviors around dating as well as the experience of being a woman navigating this complicated terrain. The video game is presented alongside the video and print-based source materials from the seduction coaches themselves as well as handmade cyanotype prints, videos and books produced by the artist in response to her experience investigating this field and the ways in which women are literally presented as objects in physical and digital space.

‘The Game: The Game’ is a continuation of ‘BANGED’ a year-long project in which the artist interviewed ‘Bang’ series author and manosphere figurehead Roosh V and tried to get in contact with his alleged sexual partners. After working on ‘BANGED’, the black and white ways in which this field has been portrayed seemed too simple and unfair to all parties who encounter it and provoked this question: Is practicing “game” inherently wrong and dishonest or can it be practiced in a way that simply levels the dating playing field in favor of those who are otherwise socially or physically disadvantaged?

By disguising the most notorious PUAs alongside game-less individuals and PUAs-in-training and placing the player into the perspective of a woman forced to distinguish between them all – Washko hopes to add levels of complexity to public conversations around both pick-up and feminism which have both found themselves most often presented in highly polarized, dichotomous positions in mainstream media.

The first chapter of the game will be presented at TRANSFER along with a musical score composed by Xiu Xiu, whose perverse, challenging, personal and complex music complement the murky, frequently dark, isolating and complicated experiences and aesthetics presented in ‘The Game: The Game’.

A full inventory of work from ’The Game: The Game’ is available from the gallery. Please inquire with the director@transfergallery.com to request information.

ABOUT THE ARTIST///

Angela Washko is an artist, writer and facilitator devoted to creating new forums for discussions of feminism in the spaces most hostile toward it. She is currently a Visiting Assistant Professor at Carnegie Mellon University. In 2012, Washko founded The Council on Gender Sensitivity and Behavioral Awareness in World of Warcraft as an ongoing intervention inside the most popular massively multiplayer online role-playing game of all time. In 2015, she interviewed seduction author, manosphere leader and former pick-up artist dubbed “the web’s most infamous misogynist” as her practice has moved away from tactical media and toward digital ethnography. ‘The Game: The Game’ is her first video game project.

A recent recipient of a Franklin Furnace Performance Fund Grant, a Frank-Ratchye Fund for Art at the Frontier Grant, and a Rhizome Internet Art Microgrant, Washko’s practice has been highlighted in Art in America, Frieze Magazine, Time Magazine, The Guardian (UK), ArtForum, ARTnews, The Hairpin, VICE,Hyperallergic, Rhizome, the New York Times, The Creator’s Project, and more. Her projects have been presented nationally and internationally at venues including Kiasma Museum of Contemporary Art (Helsinki, Finland), Los Angeles Museum of Contemporary Art, the Milan Design Triennale, The Andy Warhol Museum (Pittsburgh, PA), the Shenzhen Independent Animation Bienniale (Shenzhen, China), Moving Image Art Fair (London and NYC), the Rotterdam International Film Festival, Transmediale (Berlin, Germany) and Institute for Contemporary Art Boston. Her writing has been published in Creative Time Reports, FIELD Journal of Socially Engaged Art Criticism, Copenhagen University Peer Reviewed Journal (NTIK), Neural Magazine, VASA Journal of Images and Culture, .dpi Feminist Magazine of Art and Digital Culture, Hyperallergic, ANIMAL NY and more. http://angelawashko.com/

ABOUT THE MUSICIAN///

Xiu Xiu was founded in 2002 and has since released over 70 albums, film scores, books, 7-inch records and modern classical works. They have toured extensively all over the world and have been called “self flagellating”, “harsh”, “brutal”, “shocking” and “perverse” but also “genius”, “brilliant”, “unique”, “imaginative” and “luminous” by international press.

Xiu Xiu has a long history of collaborating with artists including (but not limited to) Dahn Vo, Swans, David Horvitz, Lawrence English, Grouper, Merzbow, Tim Berne, Eugene Robinson, Mary Halverson, Larsen, John Congleton and now Angela Washko.