Love and Theft: Peggy Ahwesh and Sondra Perry Play Video Games
Video gaming is nearly as old as the mass-market television itself, with patents for ‘Cathode ray amusement devices’ dating back to 1947. As the first generation of video artists were staging interventions into the one-way directionality of TV, an industry of arcade and home-use interactive game consoles was emerging, raising a whole new set of conceptual possibilities and obstacles for the medium.
As curator Giampaolo Bianconi points out, video art history has not always known how to respond to this outgrowth, particularly in translating gaming’s real-time responsiveness and immersion into gallery-ready, single-channel works. For our seventh feature, Bianconi considers two videos that utilize footage from popular game franchises. Peggy Ahwesh’s She Puppet (2001) explores the “bazonga-femininity” of Laura Croft’s Tomb Raider, while Sondra Perry’s IT’S IN THE GAME ‘17 (2017) centers on the appropriated likenesses in Electronic Arts’s NCAA basketball series, both offering powerful commentary on virtuality, identity and theft.
Peggy Ahwesh, She Puppet
2001, 15:20 min, color, sound
Streaming period for this work has ended.
Sondra Perry, IT’S IN THE GAME ‘17
2017, 16:32 min, color, sound, HD video
Viewable via Rhizome.
Like video’s larger place in the history of art, video art doesn’t always know how to deal with video games. When used as an artistic medium, video games exacerbate the fundamental difficulties of video as a medium. Is this a work in and of itself or is it a record of an activity? Can the work survive removal from its material support? Can we find genuine agency among so many technologies? Artists who have tinkered with video games as a medium, including Peggy Ahwesh, Seth Price, JODI, Mendi + Keith Obadike, Cory Arcangel, and Sondra Perry, have answered these questions in various ways. A close work at two works—Peggy Ahwesh’s She Puppet (2001) and Sondra Perry’s IT’S IN THE GAME ‘17 (2017)—shows how, across almost twenty years, artists have contended with the potentials and pitfalls of video games.
To make She Puppet, Ahwesh recorded herself playing Tomb Raider on a computer and then edited the material together as if it were found footage. A successful video game franchise that spawned a series of feature films, Tomb Raider allows the player to control archeologist Lara Croft as she journeys through tombs and ruins in search of mythical ancient objects. Much of the game’s popularity stems from Croft’s bazonga-femininity: outfitted in short shorts and an angular-chested tank top, Croft is designed to be a sexy video game protagonist. Instead of following the game’s objectives, Ahwesh directs Croft to explore the edges of the game-world, often leading her directly to her death. For fifteen minutes, we watch as our pixelated heroine dies only to be resuscitated and then die again and again. From Croft’s eternal ritual sacrifice, Ahwesh reveals Croft’s rudimentary eroticism as fundamentally entangled with her other most attractive feature: her endless capacity for death. She Puppet turns Tomb Raider from a video game into a libidinal murder-machine.
Ahwesh has described She Puppet as both a commentary on and an homage to Tomb Raider. What emerges from Ahwesh’s work is not so simplistic as a condemnation of feminine exploitation, but is instead also a portrait of a dark and complex pleasure. The sadistic erotic charge that emerges in She Puppet is a direct result of gaming’s ability to allow a player to control a female figure in a restricted, limited space. It is not merely in watching Croft’s actions but in the knowledge that someone is controlling her that the unique nexus of She Puppet’s pleasure reveals itself. As Ahwesh directs Croft to the edge of gameplay, she is free to explore the limits and consequences of virtual action.
Since Tomb Raider and She Puppet, video games have expanded their frameworks, growing to encompass larger worlds and moving into our own. Games have less discernible limitations as players and developers prefer the feeling of open-world environments with larger lexicons of potential actions and more cinematic visuals. At the same time, gamification and strategies that apply the visual cues and analytics of gameplay to non-virtual activities in daily life have proliferated in tandem with all manner of smart-devices. As evidenced by increasing Augmented Reality games and technologies, video games continue to encroach on reality.
Across Sondra Perry’s work, digital avatars serve as frequent reminders of how technology can snatch agency and representation from extraction and commodification. In IT’S IN THE GAME ’17 (2017), Perry approaches these topics directly. Perry focuses on the story of her twin brother Sandy, a college basketball player whose likeness was sold by the NCAA to video game production company Electronic Arts. As a result, he appeared in 2009 and 2010 editions of NCAA basketball games. Sandy was never compensated for his use in these games. In Perry’s video, video games become implicated in the history of extraction and racial capitalism. Yet Perry doesn’t restrict herself to the world of the game, as her video weaves in and out of the gameplay, museums, and her own animations. And why shouldn’t she? In the years since She Puppet, video games have expanded from a distinct site to an element of reality itself.
We see Sandy choosing himself in the game and talking about his friends who are also used and depicted. Later, the Perry siblings explore and photograph collections of artifacts at the Metropolitan Museum of Art—many of which were themselves extracted during periods of colonization and imperialism. IT’S IN THE GAME ‘17 draws a direct line between material and digital forms of racialized theft and exploitation. As the Perry siblings tour the museum, they chose works to photograph on their cellphones, which Sondra Perry later uses to render these objects from the Metropolitan’s collection as digital animations, in an act of techno-repatriation. If these tools can serve as technologies for extraction, Perry seems to ask, might they also provide possibilities for redress?
In Perry’s video, the relationship between the world of video games and our own world is entirely porous. No longer sequestered, as Lara Croft once was, within the limits of the screen or the game world, these video games have become so entangled with reality that theft and extraction have become their precondition. Despite the divergent video game environments from which they emerge, both Ahwesh and Perry offer a similar way out of the quagmires of video game exploitation. In neither case do Ahwesh or Perry repress the power of this complex medium. Instead, they use the tools of video games against themselves. Ahwesh offers a vision of hijacked gameplay that allows for an enjoyment and critique of games; Perry shows how translating real people and things into the digital space of the game can create a potentially just digital world. Whether through erotically-charged détournement or a higher equity that can only be achieved through the redress of theft, the only way out is back in.
Giampaolo Bianconi is Curator at Museum Brandhorst, Munich, a post he assumed in January, 2021. Previously, he was a curator at the Museum of Modern Art, New York. At MoMA, he was a curator for the inaugural reinstallation of MoMA's collection following its 2019 expansion. He acquired numerous works for the museum's collection and organized exhibitions, performances, and events. His writing appears in various catalogues and publications including Artforum, Frieze, and Rhizome.
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