Georgie Roxby Smith

ARTICLE: GEORGIE ROXBY SMITH VS. THE MADONNA-WHORE COMPLEX

As VRAL current solo exhibition focuses on Georgie Roxby Smith’s new Blood Paintings series, we aim to illuminate her legacy of confrontational game-based art by examining a pivotal early work, Lara Croft, Domestic Goddess I & II, which re-cast the Tomb Raider heroine as a proto-tradwife in her most challenging mission.

The endlessly looping cries of gaming icon Lara Croft echo incongruously over household chores in Georgie Roxby Smith’s 2013 performance and Second Life intervention, Lara Croft, Domestic Goddess I & II. The female explorer’s torture screams punctuate mundane, uneventful acts like washing and ironing clothes. The superimposition of discordant feminine spheres spotlights the bias still dogging video games’ staunchest female characters today. Despite efforts celebrating Lara Croft’s emotional depth and resolve through various reboots and remakes, her graphic anguish feels all too familiarly pinned to outmoded visions of femininity from the franchises’ past.

Having already probed systemic dangers subtly encoded for female avatars through works like The Fall Girl in 2012, here Smith spotlights the lingering identity tensions constraining Lara Croft. The Tomb Raider icon embodies a discombobulating identity bifurcation: aspiring towards fierce, capable heroism on one hand while still confined as an ornament for the traditionally masculine demographic’s visual greed alone on the other. As Croft’s strained persona splits unevenly between feminist icon and fetishized pin-up, she exemplifies unreconciled contradictions of projecting strength while submitting to the objectifying male gaze. By confronting this demeaning binary — akin to the  dichotomy informing the Madonna-whore complex mapping women into mutually exclusive camps of saintly virtue or debased promiscuity — Smith indicts the media forces that tokenize liberatory gestures yet withhold full multidimensional womanhood under paternalistic pretense…


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Matteo Bittanti

Works cited

George Roxby Smith, Fair Game [Run like a girl], in-game performance, machinima (color, sound, 13’ 56”), 2015.

Georgie Roxby Smith, Lara Croft, Domestic Goddess I & II, Lara Croft death noises from Tomb Raider (2013), 3D model, Second Life intervention, looped continuously for duration.

Georgie Roxby Smith, The Fall Girl, in-game performance and machinima (color, sound, 8’ 07”), 2012.

Peggy Ahwesh, She Puppet, digital video, color, sound, 15’, 2001.

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ARTICLE: GEORGIE ROXBY SMITH AND THE LONELINESS OF THE LONG DISTANCE NPC RUNNER

As VRAL current solo exhibition focuses on Georgie Roxby Smith’s new Blood Paintings series, we aim to illuminate her legacy of confrontational game-based art by examining a pivotal early work, Fair Game [Run Like A Girl]. Our analysis centers on overlapping themes in Smith’s practice of visual confrontation around gaming’s ingrained normalization of violence towards feminine identity and representation...

In her 2015 performance Fair Game [Run Like A Girl], Georgie Roxby Smith hijacks the marginalized female non-playable characters in Grand Theft Auto V, stretching their flight animations into disturbing prey. As her sadistic avatar stalks and toys with these sexualized bots in the streets (and hills!) of Los Santos, their loops of cowering and screaming indict the misogyny hard-coded into this digital Californication. 

Before examining the work, the ominous title warrants exploration. As Emma Griffin explains in her monumental work, “fair game” historically traces back to the hunting fields of 19th century Britain, where it was used to denote legal and ethical parameters around which animals could be hunted during a given season. Anything deemed within the boundaries of “fair game” – open for sporting, capture, or killing – was considered unprotected prey. Already by the late 1800s however, the idiomatic implications had extended more broadly to refer to anything – or for that matter, anyone– that dominant powers or social forces considered appropriate targets for criticism, ridicule, sexualization or attack without fear of consequences or concern over consent. Victim blaming was implicit; in the cultural view, targets labeled “fair game” were themselves presumed to invite trouble or violence due to defiant or nonconforming attitudes, appearances, or behavior.

In choosing Fair Game as the title of her intervention, Smith knowingly evokes the historical associations of marking feminine bodies as vulnerable game ripe for one-sided, unethical hunting by more powerful and forceful antagonists. Her interrogation lays bare gaming ecosystems and cultures enabling the chasing and tormenting of women without consequences under the veneer of play and the pretext of fun. Let’s now concentrate on the second part of the title. The bracketed “run like a girl” also carries insidious coding limitations into culture. The phrase has history mocking supposedly inherent feminine weakness and first surfaced as a comment denouncing “inadequate masculinity”. Specifically, it critiqued women’s alleged lack of power, speed or coordination.. 

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Matteo Bittanti

Works cited

Georgie Roxby Smith, Fair Game [Run like a girl], in-game performance, machinima (color, sound, 13’ 56”), 2015

Georgie Roxby Smith, 99 Problems [WASTED], in-game performance, machinima (color, sound, 4’ 45”), 2014

Georgie Roxby Smith, Blood Paintings, digital video, color, sound, 11’ 06”, 2024

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ARTICLE: GEORGIE ROXBY SMITH, AVATAR MARTYR

VRAL is currently presenting Georgie Roxby Smith’s Blood Paintings as a single channel video. To fully appreciate the significance of this series, we are exploring various artworks in her oeuvre. Our discussion continues with the 2014 in-game performance and machinima 99 Problems [WASTED], in which she lays bare the destructive ideological apparatus turning a woman from playable protagonist to disposable puppet. An apparatus revealed in all its banality through this avatar’s hopelessness before the blasé machinery of suicide.

A scantily clad, blood splattered female avatar takes position underneath a grimy Los Santos overpass, nonchalantly pressing a pistol barrel to her temple. Face impassive, she pulls the trigger without hesitation or emotion. As the crack of the gunshot fades, her body collapses limply to the ground. But the scene soon repeats in a different setting; the nameless woman reappears in different locations of an ersatz Los Angeles, apparently unscathed. She promptly turns the gun on herself once more. And then again. And again. Welcome to Georgie Roxby Smith’s 99 Problems [WASTED].

Rather than embrace the free-roaming escapades and rags-to-riches schemes promised by Rockstar Games, Smith pursues vicarious self-destruction via her avatar in order to critique the game’s normalization of disproportionate feminine victimization and sidelining. Each gunshot shrieks for recognition by game publishers and players alike of women’s ritualized vulnerability, marginalization, misrepresentation, and fleeting relevance in adventures coded around masculine power fantasies and patriarchal prerogatives.

The settings chosen by Smith for her suicide(s) add another layer of meaning through provocative juxtapositions. Her avatar enacts public immolation before storefronts boasting suggestive names such as “Heroin Chic” to “Hole”. Likewise, the protagonist’s ritualized demise unfolds around caricatures of consumerism and vanity, as selfie-snapping tourists remain oblivious next to the bloodshed. A rather explicit ad for “hamburger meat” near a bus stop functions as a background for another death. Boys toys, i.e., signifiers of masculinity, also frame some vignettes, as sports cars and firearms signifying power and control. Through these judiciously chosen environmental factors, Smith further implicates the saturating messages that enable the devaluing of women’s lives and identities across societies both real and virtual. 

The ceaseless repetition produces surprising effects: the initial shock of Smith’s female avatar brutally committing suicide soon gives way among viewers to contrasting feelings ranging from desensitized ennui to warped anticipation…

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Matteo Bittanti

Works cited

George Roxby Smith, 99 Problems [WASTED], in-game performance, machinima (color, sound, 4’ 45”), 2014

Georgie Roxby Smith, Blood Paintings, digital video, color, sound, 11’ 06”, 2024

Brody Condon, Suicide Solution, DVD documentation of in-game performance, 19’, 2004

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ARTICLE: GEORGIE ROXBY SMITH, GLITCH WITCH

VRAL is currently presenting Georgie Roxby Smith’s Blood Paintings as a single channel video. To fully appreciate the significance of this series, we will explore various artworks. Our discussion starts with Smith’s landmark 2012 in-game performance and machinima The Fall Girl.

Like an anxious dancer condemned to endless pirouettes, the female protagonist of Georgie Roxby Smith’s The Fall Girl spins helplessly down a bleak mountain passage in The Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim, contorted by an inadvertent “death glitch.” With her avatar locked in this ceaseless loop of hellish torture, Smith captures extended footage exposing the anguished animation frame-by-frame in its punishing inertia. She isolates this doom loop from surrounding gameplay, forcing viewers to confront imagery typically blinked past and easily forgotten.

Removed from context, this tableaux vivant sui generis betrays the ingrained misogyny encoded subtly into gaming worlds, worlds populated largely by male creators and players enacting adventures through the restrictive lens of a decidedly masculine gaze. Bug or intentional vignette, the isolated scene reduces Skyrim’s expansive questing freedom to the ruthless physics binding female characters: they must ultimately submit to situations, no matter how treacherous, tied to their prescribed femininity. It’s in the game! It’s codified! It is what it is!

In other words, the revolution we witness here is literal, or, rather physical: the female character is spinning on her axis, over and over again. This revolution as continual rotation leads to a revelation. Through this glitch excavation, Smith moves beyond the industry’s celebratory talk of interactivity as freedom, “abdication of authorship”, “co-creation” and “emergent” player stories, pervasive in fandom studies and game studies. Instead, recalling feminist film theory traditions, she confronts gaming technology’s uncanny knack for magnifying the most disturbing drives and assumptions underlying popular culture. Stuck in her deadly spin, The Fall Girl becomes less individual than archetype or trope, a sacrificial testament to the cyclical violence awaiting game heroines straying beyond plastic pedestals into masculine power fantasies.

Even Lara Croft, hailed once as groundbreaking virtual female representation, submitted to famously voyeuristic death scenes accentuating her hyper-sexualized physique rendered vulnerable, as both Miltos Manetas and Peggy Ahwesh remind us…

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Matteo Bittanti

Works cited

Georgie Roxby Smith, The Fall Girl, in-game performance and machinima (color, sound, 8’ 07”), 2012.

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ARTICLE: A CLOSER LOOK AT GEORGIE ROXBY SMITH’S BLOOD PAINTINGS

Georgie Roxby Smith, Blood Paintings, digital video, 2024, still

VRAL is currently showcasing Georgie Roxby Smith’s Blood Paintings series as a single channel machinima. Today we take a closer look at her process to highlight key themes and contextualize her aesthetic choices.

At first glimpse, the lurid black and red canvases of Georgie Roxby Smith’s Blood Paintings betray little of the cold, mechanical violence from whence they emerged. Yet the intra-triptych of videos, prints and photographs accompanying each finished piece document one of the most conceptually daring artistic processes within game art in recent memory, bridging virtual chaos and physical creation.

The genesis occurs not with “traditional” brushes, but with a stolen sedan careening down the endless freeways of Grand Theft Auto V’s sprawling fictional city, Los Santos. Smith ritualistically mows down random pedestrian after pedestrian, indifferent to the piled corpses littering her wake, or rather, using them as a source material. Through an online machinima feed, these virtual “vehicular blood harvests” stream to screens in her corporeal studio. Eyes locked on the carnage, the vampiric artist enacts swift gestural translations of each fresh victim into pigment. Ram, observe, render, repeat: a piece takes shape with each new mark responding to lives callously extinguished in a doom loop of hit-and-hit-and-hit-and-drag.

When the gameplay session concludes, having claimed several bystanders sacrificially for the sake of her work, Smith reviews the tapes from alternate camera angles. She zooms in on singular moments of compressed brutality, photoshopping images together with her physical canvas snapshots. These digital/physical hybrids form the third component in presenting each unique Blood Painting. Beside them, innocuous “art selfies” feature the artist clutching her macabre works with almost maternal pride rather than horror at their genesis.

These self congratulatory portraits seem jarringly incongruous beside the disturbing machinima footage of pedestrian carnage used to inspire…

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Matteo Bittanti

Works cited

Georgie Roxby Smith

Blood Paintings

digital video, color, sound, 11’ 06”, 2024, Australia

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EVENT: GEORGIE ROXBY SMITH (FEBRUARY 2 - 15 2024, ONLINE)

Blood Paintings

digital video, color, sound, 11’ 06”, 2024, Australia

Created by Georgie Roxby Smith

Georgie Roxby Smith’s Blood Paintings series merges digital gaming spaces and physical art. Each piece comprises three distinct components: a machinima documenting repetitive violence against GTA V pedestrians, intimate selfies showcasing the finished abstract paintings that violence yields, and hybrid digital/physical prints combining in-game imagery with organic artistic styles. This unique, multi-format presentation offers insight into both the meticulous creative process and the provocative contrast between clinical virtual acts and tactile human artistry.

Georgie Roxby Smith is a pioneering digital artist who uses gaming, AI, video, and performance to probe modern identity and reality. Her work focuses on representing marginalized groups, especially women, in online environments. Artworks like The Fall Girl and 99 Problems [WASTED] expose violence against female video game characters, critiquing the misogyny embedded in gaming worlds. Smith’s bold, confrontational, socially-engaged art has exhibited globally and earned prestigious grants and residencies. As virtual and actual boundaries blur, her practice reveals hard truths about identity and systemic bias persisting digitally. Blending emerging tech and mass media, Smith dispels notions of liberation in our increasingly visual world. Her immersive works harbor the probing questions that will propel digital art to its next avant-garde evolution.

VIDEO: GLITCHED RITUALS, UNCANNY REPLICAS. DECODING NATALIE MAXIMOVA’S EPISODES

PATREON-EXCLUSIVE CONTENT

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PATREON-EXCLUSIVE CONTENT 〰️

As part of our ongoing coverage of Natalie Maximova’sThe Edge of the World, currently exhibited on VRAL, we are delighted to present an essay about Maximova's video piece Episodes (2021).

In recent years, within the context of contemporary art, the appropriation and recontextualization of video game assets has emerged as a powerful practice for artists to explore themes of identity, technology, and digital aesthetics. Through the repurposing of these virtual elements, artists navigate the complex terrain between video art and gaming, forging new pathways of artistic expression and broadening the very definition of machinima. This convergence offers a fertile ground for critical reflection, inviting viewers to ponder both the potential and the limitations of increasingly popular simulated horizons.

One notable exemplar of this artistic investigation is Elaine Hoey’s 2019 mesmerizing video work, Animated Positions. The piece prompts viewers to reconsider the underlying frames and symbolism ingrained within traditional art by juxtaposing it with the domain of video games. Specifically, Hoey delves into the tradition of 19th-century European nationalist paintings, unraveling the intricate role of art in the representation of jingoistic patriotic ideals that have acquired cultural symbolism in nation-state formation. Breathed anew, the bellicose postures and poses of male figures depicted in these historical paintings come to life through character animation sourced from the popular first-person shooter Call of Duty by Activision Blizzard. By comparing digital reenactments of war-like stances with the traditional aesthetics of nationalist art, Animated Positions defies romanticized notions of nostalgia associated with the nation-state, offering a critique of the pervasive violence underpinning modern nationalistic ideologies and the glorification of aggression found in mainstream video games.

When I say that Animated Positions exemplifies the practice of artistic decontextualization, I mean that Hoey skillfully appropriated characters’ animations from their original context, i.e., video games, thereby altering their meaning and relevance as she inserted it somewhere else, i.e, a specific Western tradition of sculpture and painting. The artist employs the strategy of decontextualization to illuminate and offer alternative interpretations by removing an element from its usual context, associations, and intended uses. For example, this approach suggests a connection between the artworld and the gaming milieu, particularly regarding representation. Furthermore, it implies that both art and games can function as forms of propaganda, even if they are not commonly recognized as such. Additionally, the artist proposes that the conventional distinction between high art and the vernacular lacks foundation, as they share similar themes, values, and objectives. Ultimately, Hoey’s use of decontextualization serves as a creative strategy to disrupt prevailing narratives, question societal norms, and foster critical engagement. Animated Positions reframes and reinterprets familiar ideas, inviting viewers to contemplate different perspectives and rethink the underlying assumptions or principles attached to the decontextualized items.

Natalie Maximova’s equally thought-provoking work, Episodes, is another compelling example of critical decontextualization through the repurposing of video game assets…

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Matteo Bittanti

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EVENT: DIGITAL VIDEO WALL @ METRONOM (MULTIPLE DATES, MODENA, ITALY)

FILTRO @ METRONOM

via Carteria 10

41121 Modena Italy

Multiple dates

Curated by Gemma Fantacci

The theme of METRONOM’s digital art wall for 2022 is FILTRO (Filter). The series, curated by Gemma Fantacci, features a series of artworks situated between gaming, digital art, and video art. The series debuted with Georgie Roxby Smith’s Ain't Free continues with Carson Lynn’s Storm and Stress (2020) until February 14.

Metronom is an art gallery and publishing house based in Modena. Metronom is committed to researching and promoting projects related to contemporary visual culture through personal and collective exhibitions of Italian and international artists. The attention to the creative practices of the younger generations finds a dedicated place in the video wall, where contents related to digital experimentation are presented through an active 24h screen, positioned in the gallery window. Metronom promotes national and international initiatives, in collaboration with public and private institutions, also organized off-site. Alongside the exhibition program, Metronom is dedicated to theoretical research and critical debate, through the Critical Generation project: an annual conference where selected speakers debate the art of the present and a bilingual online magazine, with interviews, insights, critical essays, reviews and news. Metronom launched the editorial project Metronom Books, dedicated to artist books and limited editions created with the direct involvement of the authors.

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FILTRO @ METRONOM

via Carteria 10

41121 Modena Italy

Varie date

Curato da Gemma Fantacci

Il tema del digital wart wall di METRONOM per il 2022 è FILTRO. La serie, curata da Gemma Fantacci, presenta una serie di opere d'arte situate tra videogioco, arte digitale e video arte. La serie ha debuttato con Ain’t Free di Georgie Roxby Smith e continua con Storm and Stress di Carson Lynn (2020) fino al 14 febbraio.

Metronom è una galleria d’arte e casa editrice con sede a Modena. Metronom si impegna a ricercare e promuovere progetti legati alla cultura visiva contemporanea attraverso mostre personali e collettive di artisti italiani e internazionali. L'attenzione alle pratiche creative delle giovani generazioni trova un luogo dedicato nel videowall, in cui contenuti legati alla sperimentazione digitale sono presentati attraverso uno schermo attivo 24h, posizionato nella vetrina della galleria. Metronom promuove iniziative a livello nazionale e internazionale, in collaborazione con istituzioni pubbliche e private, organizzate anche fuori sede. Accanto al programma espositivo, Metronom si dedica alla ricerca teorica e al dibattito critico, attraverso il progetto Generazione Critica: un convegno annuale dove relatori selezionati dibattono sull'arte del presente e una rivista bilingue online, con interviste, approfondimenti, saggi di critica, recensioni e notizie. Metronom ha avviato il progetto editoriale Metronom Books, dedicato ai libri d'artista e alle edizioni limitate realizzate con il coinvolgimento diretto degli autori.

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NEWS: GAME VIDEO ESSAY B (MARCH 13 2020)

GAME VIDEO ESSAY A(1).png

GAME VIDEO ESSAY B features a series of documentaries made with video game engines that apply the video essay format to machinima. This program, which debuted in 2019, returns to Milan with four original contributions made by four international artists, on themes ranging from filter bubbles to virtual economies, from gender representation in gaming to the ideology of nationalism.

GAME VIDEO ESSAY B propone una selezione di documentari realizzati attraverso videogiochi che applicano al machinima il formato del video essay. La formula, già sperimentata nel 2019, ritorna con quattro contributi originali realizzati da altrettante artiste internazionali, su temi che spaziano dalle filter bubbles alle economie virtuali, dalla rappresentazione di gender nei videogiochi all’ideologia del nazionalismo.

TRAILER

LOCATION/TIMES

Friday March 13 2020/Venerdì 13 marzo 2020

Contemporary Exhibition Hall (IULM OPEN SPACE)

09:00 - 19:00 Free Entry

LINE-UP/PROGRAMMA

Elaine Hoey, Animated Positions

machinima/digital video, color, sound, 23’ 39”, 2019. United Kingdom.

Cassie McQuater, PAY2PLAY

machinima/digital video, color, sound, 13’ 40”, 2019. United States of America.

Georgie Roxby Smith, AIN'T FREE

machinima/digital video, color, sound, 25’ 08”, 2019. Germany.

Letta Shtohryn, Algorithmic Oracle

machinima/digital video, color, sound, single channel composite, 8’ 12”, 2019. Ukraine.