GameScenes is conducting a series of interviews with artists, critics, curators, and gallery owners active in the field of Game Art, as part of an ongoing investigation of the social history of this artworld. Our goal is to document and discuss both the origins and evolution of a phenomenon that changed the way game-based art is being created, experienced, shared, and discussed today.
Alex Hovet is a New York City-based artist currently pursuing an MFA in Photography, Video and Related Media at the School of Visual Arts. She constructs visual representations of disappearance to ask whether it can be controlled. From still and moving images to online platforms, Hovet use lens- and screen-based tools to investigate the stability of physical and digital memory. For our ongoing series of conversations with contemporary artists who appropriate and incorporate videogame aesthetics and logics, we asked Alex Hovet a few questions about her recent works, including the machinima Counter-Charge (2016), Apotheosys (2016) and (Hohum)...it's gonna be a looong game (2016).
This interview took place via email in February 2017.
Hovet's Counter-Charge will be featured in the first edition of ART GAME DEMOS in Marseille, France.
Alex Hovet, Counter-Charge, 2016, Video, color, sound, TRT
GameScenes: You studied at Bennington College and are currently completing an MFA at the School of Visual Arts. Can you identify specific courses, teachers, events or situations that provided epiphanic moments or turning points in your development as an artist? Moreover, which artists and/or scholars do you find inspiring?
Alex Hovet: When I began undergrad, I was more focused on traditional narrative filmmaking and scriptwriting. As I took introductory classes in video-making and film history, I found more and more that it was more natural for me to make experimental, non-narrative, non-linear, or installation works. My undergrad thesis work was a collection of videos about the persistent short-term memory loss that my father suffers, as a result of a cerebral hemorrhage he had when I was a teenager. The way that came about was that I was introduced to GoldMosh, a data-moshing freeware that was essentially a pre-programmed Max patch in which you could input videos and they would get moshed. This process immediately struck me as a clear visual parallel to this memory trauma that my father and I were a part of, in different ways. I was able to easily recognize these structural elements of experimental filmmaking that were easily used to talk about these personal themes. I really value the structural possibilities of moving image editing, and it is still the most natural way for me, I think, to create clear connections in theme and content. When I saw Peggy Ahwesh's video She Puppet in an undergraduate class, I was immediately taken by the singular use of gameplay as its visual content. It wasn't appropriated footage in the way I had seen or used, taken from multiple sources or re-edited. It was live appropriation, live editing, which the filmmaker was both in control and at the mercy of, free to navigate the game how she wanted, but constricted by its most basic rules and spaces. They had a kind of mutual dissatisfaction, or a shared wish to go beyond what they could both achieve in that space. That video in particular was a stand-out influence on my work, and continued to be when I decided to make Counter-Charge last year. It's in large part an homage to She Puppet.
Alex Hovet, Apotheosis, 2016, Video, color, sound, TRT
GameScenes: How, when and why did you start appropriating and incorporating video games in your practice? What do you find especially interesting about digital games - their aesthetics, ideology or medium-specific features (e.g. interactivity)? Did/do you play video games? If so, what genre or titles do/did you find yourself attracted to?
Alex Hovet: I made
Counter-Charge in my first semester of grad school. I h
ad been using the Internet Archive (archive.org) as a well of source materials since undergrad, and I came across their new collection of archived games from the late-80s and 90s. Almost all of them were completely preserved so that you could easily play them right in the browser. What I noticed immediately was that there was a majority of "adult" games. There were playlists within the larger collection made by users of these adult-oriented games. One collection was just called "sex." And it's no surprise that they weren't just games for adults, but were all games made by and for men--about women. Or featuring women, if not quite about them. I played several versions of strip poker games, card games, and text-based games. I had played games growing up and still cherish the relationship I had not only with the worlds of the games, but the one I had with myself when playing. I was an only child and I was always invested in narratives and games that had goals and checkpoints and ultimate achievements. I noticed in these Internet Archive collections several
Leisure Suit Larry games. The first one I happened to play was
Leisure Suit Larry III: Passionate Patti in Pursuit of the Pulsating Pectorals.
Alex Hovet, (Hohum)...it's gonna be a looong game, 2016, 14min excerpt, channels 1-3
GameScenes: To create Counter Charge (2016) you appropriated the classic adventure game Leisure Suit Larry to highlight ideas about sex and gender embedded in games. (Hohum)...it's gonna be a looong game directly addresses "the misogynistic gameplay of Cover Girl Strip Poker, a 1991 MS-DOS computer game". As you write in your statement, (Hohum)...it's gonna be a looong game "deconstructs the crude embodiments of male desire which integrates the objectification of the female body with disfiguring early computerized graphics and interactivity." Are you familiar with the ongoing debate about gender representation in digital games (think Anita Sarkeesian or Angela Washko, the former with pop academic angle, the latter distinctly artistic)? If so, how do you think that artist projects can contribute to bringing to the surface - and perhaps even change - inherent, persistent biases about gender roles? Are you focusing on games produced in the late 1980s and early 1990s for a specific reason? Do you think that the representation/simulation of female bodies in video games has changed has changed since then?
Alex Hovet: I made Hohum, a kind of proposal for a multi-screen installation, right before Counter-Charge. I was interested in this reversal of being a woman playing a game that assumed I was a man and addressed me as such through in-game text, which then creates this androgynous third entity that couldn't exist without me or without the game. But in the strip poker game I played to make Hohum, I was still played as myself without any avatar to control, so when I played Leisure Suit Larry, I was controlling. And we had to co-exist in order for the game to happen at all, and even though the game is designed a certain way, and Larry has a predetermined set of goals and traits, they couldn't be executed without my control. So after a while playing the game freely and screen-recording myself wandering around with Larry, I started over and followed a walkthrough so that I could actually move through the game and finish it and be able to figure out where I could mess with the structure. Along the way, I found that there were built-in instances where Larry's gender and sexuality were questioned, or rather non-binary gender identities were depicted for comic or crude effect, but I was interested in these layers of identity questions created when I played. And the amazing thing about this installation of the game is that halfway through your perspective actually switches from Larry to Patti, so then I was a woman actually playing a female character that a man was supposed to be playing. And I thought about the men that would be playing this game as Larry who then find themselves as Patti and what that means. So when I edited Counter-Charge I was thinking about it as this investigation of gender expression, both mine and Larry's, and challenging the constructs of the game to talk about this. I used the idea of cathexis, which is defined in the ASMR narration, to explore Larry's attachment to Patti in alternative ways than love or lust. And in questioning those, I was questioning my own cathexis onto Larry, and why I was so drawn to him and to myself through him. I think that is what is so interesting about video games. Even as a solitary kid, I played hours of Pokemon on my Gameboy Color. My gender expression, especially as a kid, was pretty non-binary, and I was often playing these games that had you as male characters, and I think that mediated relationship, this kind of spectrum of yourself, is what interests me the most.
Alex Hovet, External Memory Devices, ongoing
GameScenes: Your External Memory Devices series is terribly interesting for a variety of reasons. Do you believe that your own memories and experiences are somehow "stored" video games? If you did play games when you were growing up, do you believe that a part of Alex Hovet is forever "archived" in these virtual worlds? Are video games the equivalent of a time capsule?
Alex Hovet: External Memory Devices in my in-progress thesis work at the School of Visual Arts. While I haven't considered a connection explicitly between this work and video games, I think that's an interesting possibility. The work stems from this current scientific process in which digital files can be encoded into DNA (taking binary 1s and 0s and translating them into ATCG) as this ideal, long-lasting, infinitesimal archive. It's like removing your humanness from a body, reducing it down to its most basic and essential element, while also replacing mechanical media such as hard drives. For me, it evokes a forced-obsolescence of our own physical bodies and memories. There are connections between these ideas and video games as spaces which replace your physical body and hold the data that is produced inside of it, outside of you. And because I have a lot of memories associated with and held within games, there is this thread of diaphanous existence inherent across so many platforms. Can all of our memories be preserved, and if so, does it require the complete extraction from and absence of our physical minds?
GameScenes: Your video work has been presented internationally - from New York to Berlin, from Mexico to Canada - in both experimental cinema festivals and video art exhibitions. I have two questions: Where did you find the most curious, intrigued, receptive audience? Also, do curators label your game-based video "machinima", "experimental cinema" or "video art"?
Alex Hovet: My video has generally been regarded as experimental, and I don't think it's been explicitly labeled machinima, but I certainly consider it to fall into the category. One of the few places I've been able to see the video screened was at Haverhill Experimental Film Festival in Massachusetts, where it was given a Juror Mention. I think it fit well in that traditional experimental film space, but I would love to see it interact simultaneously in spaces with other works, perhaps in an installation.
All images and videos courtesy of the Artist
