Character Creator
Curated by Bob Bicknell-Knight
Bob Bicknell-Knight, Jamie Janković, Cassie McQuater, Petra Szemán, Willem Weismann and Stacia Yeapanis
14th March – 14th April 2024
SEAGER, Distillery Tower, 2 Mill Lane, London, UK
The second in a four-part exhibition series organised by Bob Bicknell-Knight at SEAGER, titled Matchmaking, exploring how artists make work with and about video games, Character Creator investigates the idea of the avatar, second selves and lives lived online. The exhibition reflects upon how artists use video games as a vehicle for speaking about representation in the digital space, escaping into virtual worlds and finding oneself through the act of play.
Each exhibition in the series is accompanied by a reading list of books that inspired the ideas behind the exhibition, as well as a number of books selected by the exhibiting artists that inform their practice, available to read within the gallery space whilst sitting on a custom-built bench. As the series of shows continue, the separate bookshelves will slowly fill with books, effectively becoming an archive of all four exhibitions.
Within the world of video games, a character creator is a tool, usually appearing at the beginning of the game, that enables the player to design and customise the avatar that they will be playing as. The options available to a player will vary from game to game. In some the differences may simply be cosmetic, like changing a character’s hairstyle or height, whilst in other, more complicated experiences, the player will be able to modify their avatar’s mental and psychological state, adding in-game points to certain social and physical attributes. In many cases, these subtle changes will alter how the game world reacts to the player, echoing how, in the physical world, your personality and outward appearance will affect how you move through life.
The works included in Character Creator highlight and comment upon the avatars we design to represent ourselves within the games we play, and what that says about the human condition.
As you enter the gallery, Petra Szemán’s voice from the film Monomyth: gaiden / Departure (2018), echoes throughout the exhibition space. The work is the first of a four-part series exploring the artist’s relationship to their digital avatar, Yourself, as well as the processes involved in the creation of a multi-layered image world. As a self-aware protagonist moving along the frayed edges of fictional and real worlds shaped by narrative traditions, Yourself attempts to navigate landscapes that have become oversaturated with movies and fiction. The narration also implies an interplay of roles between the Character and the Player, describing how visual decisions such as clothing or piercings might be driven by either party, at one moment recounting how their ‘real life body’ had to be changed to better represent the latest, levelled-up version of the avatar.
Several paintings by Willem Weismann are present throughout the exhibition, depicting scenes related to decay and a slow decline into chaos. Weismann’s paintings, although not explicitly about video games, inhabit a hazy second space, an alternate world built, seemingly, atop our own, which a cast of characters appear to dwell within, carving out a meek existence. Both soy bean man (2023) and dandelion man (2023) present the heads of figures overwhelmed by plant life, potentially referencing the vegetable-based diets of our collective future, whilst airbag (2023) depicts a car that’s crashed into a statue, it’s occupants frozen in their seats. Weismann’s figures, especially those seen in airbag (2023) and other recent works within his oeuvre, become a mirror, reflecting our own anxieties and afflictions, much like the avatars that we inhabit and live through within video game worlds.
Considering those who find solace in video game spaces, Jamie Janković’s A Woman on the Internet (or, The Eternal Scream) (2021), combines filmic moments and poetic subtleties in an experimental documentary format. The film explores the jarring juxtapositions of friction, toxicity, joy and liberation that trans people, queers and femmes experience when playing as their own custom character creations in video game spaces. The film follows a series of perspectives and first-hand experiences, whilst showing footage captured from within the video game Grand Theft Auto V (2013), where an avatar of Jankovic explores the landscape of the game. This type of film is called a machinima, a filmmaking technique that utilizes video game graphics and engines to create animated movies or narratives.
Created within the video game world of The Sims 2 (2004), Stacia Yeapanis’ prints Waking Up Transparent (2006) and Standing In My Stomach (2006) are an early example of artists using videogames as a medium to produce their artworks. Part of Yeapanis’ project My Life as a Sim (2005 – 2007), the works depict, as is a repeated motif within the exhibition, an avatar modelled after Yeapanis’ own likeness in a series of poses and situations. Instead of living a life of normality, however, Yeapanis’ avatar appears to be distorted within the game world. When originally producing the work Yeapanis was interested in producing these glitches, exploring how they could be perceived as emotional and psychological metaphors for her virtual double. From the characters perspective, these strange moments might be identified as signs from God or the universe trying to communicate.
Reflecting on the virtual beings we encounter within digital spaces, Bob Bicknell-Knight’s paintings Hey! Listen! (2022), Can You Help Us With Some Items (2022) and Why Buy Tomorrow What You Can Buy Today (2022) contain quotes spoken by a variety of Non-Player Characters (NPCs) from different video games, combined with video game landscapes. An NPC is a character in a video game that is controlled by the game’s artificial intelligence rather than by the player. The paintings explore short one-line audio clips that are spoken by NPCs. These short sentences are called barks and can be random or in reaction to the player or events happening within the game. The phrases are often repeatedly spoken to the player, sometimes heard hundreds or even thousands of times. These works are hybrid paintings, beginning as digitally edited images which are then printed onto canvas and painted onto with acrylic paint, with the artist’s hand interacting with the digital image. The paintings are held in a series of elaborate 3D printed frames, taking inspiration from traditional frames from the 18th century that deliberate drew attention away from the subject of the work to emphasise the artificial nature of the painted representation.
Utilising assets repatriated from two distinctly different video games, Cassie McQuater’s HALO (V) (2016) and (VI) (2016) are part of a series of machinima reenactments and re-visualizations of the military science fiction video game franchise Halo (2001 – present). The characters within the works are taken or modelled after avatars from Halo and Dream Stripper (2005), a game where the player controls an array of customisable female erotic dancers. Each work moves the characters through found or stock “dying” animation loops, whilst koi, dining chairs, asteroids, guns, flowers, torches, pinball machines, pillows, and remnants of suburbia explode around them. McQuater’s work brings to the foreground some of the juxtaposing dominant cultural tropes and motifs of videogame culture; the trivialization of death and the depiction of the female body as a sexualized object.
-/-
Reading List:
– Textual Poachers: Television Fans and Participatory Culture by Henry Jenkins, 1992 (recommended by Stacia Yeapanis)
– The Candy House by Jennifer Egan, 2022 (recommended by Bob Bicknell-Knight)
– Klara and the Sun by Kazuo Ishiguro, 2021 (recommended by Bob Bicknell-Knight)
– Fake Accounts by Lauren Oyler, 2021 (recommended by Bob Bicknell-Knight)
– Things I Learned from Mario’s Butt by Laura Kate Dale, 2021 (recommended by Bob Bicknell-Knight)
– Videogame Atlas: Mapping Interactive Worlds by Luke Caspar Pearson and Sandra Youkhana, 2022 (recommended by Jamie Janković)
– The Complete Stories of Leonora Carrington by Leonora Carrington, 2017 (recommended Cassie McQuater)
– The Anime Machine: A Media Theory of Animation by Thomas LaMarre, 2009 (recommended by Petra Szemán)
– Animatic Apparatus, The: Animation, Vitality, and the Futures of the Image by Deborah Levitt, 2018 (recommended by Petra Szemán)
– The Carrier Bag Theory of Fiction by Ursula K. Le Guin, 1988 (recommended by Willem Weismann)
– In Watermelon Sugar by Richard Brautigan, 1968 (recommended by Willem Weismann)
BOB BICKNELL-KNIGHT 