Angela Washko
Assistant Professor of Art, Carnegie Mellon University
Area Head, Electronic Time-Based Art
Poking The Hive: Interventions in Unusual Media Environments
Thursday, October 3, 5:30 p.m.
62 KAM
Artist and activist Angela Washko will present several different strategies for performing, participating in and transforming online environments that are especially hostile toward women. She will introduce her long-term performative intervention “The Council on Gender Sensitivity and Behavioral Awareness in World of Warcraft” alongside several interventions, interviews, performances, written works and video games works she has created about the manosphere and online men’s seduction communities. She will additionally introduce her newest project Workhorse Queen, a documentary film about drag queen and former RuPaul’s Drag Race contestant Mrs. Kasha Davis and her life and career post-reality-television.
Angela Washko is an artist, writer and facilitator devoted to creating new forums for discussions of feminism in spaces frequently hostile toward it. Since 2012, Washko has operated The Council on Gender Sensitivity and Behavioral Awareness in World of Warcraft, an ongoing intervention inside the most popular online role-playing game of all time. Washko's most recent project, The Game: The Game, is a video game in which professional pick-up artists attempt to seduce the player using their coercive and often dangerous signature techniques sourced from their instructional books and video materials.
A recent recipient of the Impact Award at Indiecade, a Franklin Furnace Performance Fund Grant, and a Frank-Ratchye Fund for Art at the Frontier Grant, Washko's practice has been highlighted in The New Yorker, Frieze Magazine, Time Magazine, The Guardian, ArtForum, The Los Angeles Times, Art in America, The New York Times and more. Her projects have been presented internationally at venues including Museum of the Moving Image, Kiasma Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles Museum of Contemporary Art, the Milan Design Triennale, the Shenzhen Independent Animation Biennial and the Rotterdam International Film Festival. Angela Washko is an Assistant Professor of Art at Carnegie Mellon University.
Sponsors: A+D Visitors Committee and Critical Technology Studies @ NCSA
