Game Art: Alex Hovet's Counter-Charge (2015)

This is phenomenal.

In the 1989 adult-oriented computer series, Leisure Suit Larry wanders the jungle of a colonized village searching for love, which he finds, after a multitude of failed romantic interactions, with Passionate Patti, a perfect and unattainable woman. In an act of cathexis, Larry's energies concentrate on Patti in a complex of libido, love, and gender expression that leads Larry/Patti on an investigation of duality. bell hooks' meditations on love and relationships attempt to guide them through text and recordings by an ASMR reader (a phenomenon whereby young women speak in a sexualized, infantilized whisper to elicit a pleasurable response), but these attempts are rejected by the game's instinct. Larry's explorations are anti-cathected--counter-charged--and blocked by his own ego and the constructs of the game in which he wanders, his desires continually repressed. (Alex Hovet)

Alex Hovet is a New York City-based artist whose work exposes the instabilities of physical and digital memory. Based in New York City, she is completing her MFA at School of Visual Arts in Photography, Video and Related Media.

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