 Our next speaker is Angela Washko. She's an artist, writer and facilitator based in the US, where she currently is a wizarding assistant professor of art at Carnegie Mellon University. Angela's work revolves around mobilizing communities and creating new forums for discussions of feminism at places where they do not exist or which are frequently hostile, especially toward women. Her interventions, performances, written words and video games about which Angela will talk today in a few minutes have been widely received and are critically acclaimed. Angela's work has been presented in numerous venues such as the LA Museum of Contemporary Art, the Museum of the Moving Image, or the Rotterdam International Film Festival. This year she received the Impact Award at Indicate. Her work has been covered by, for instance, Art in America, The Guardian, The New York Times, Time Magazine and many many more. To sum it up we are very happy to finally have Angela here at Congress talking about strategies for activism and performance and hostile online environments. Give a warm round of applause for our next speaker, Angela Washko. Can you hear me alright? Is this working? My Britney Spears headset. I'm very excited about it. Maybe you can't see it because it's invisible. Okay, so thanks so much to everyone on the arts and culture curatorial committee that's a lot of sees for inviting me tonight. I'm Angela Washko and I'm a research-based artist and activist making video games, written works, performances and interventions often within video game and multi-user online environments. I'm also, as you heard, upgraded from visiting professor to assistant professor of art at Carnegie Mellon University so I now fully live in Pittsburgh. So today in my talk I'm going to focus on my projects investigating niche languages formed in specific online communities and my activism driven feminist interventions into the socio-cultural byproducts of our digital environments. I'll mostly talk about the game the game. A video game I recently finished based on online pickup artists communities and seduction forums. And we'll also have an audience participatory play through of the game at the end of my talk as well. So participation. I'm laughing a lot but there's actually some very difficult content in this presentation and I'll try to give adequate warnings to some of that difficult content when we get to it. But to start. Okay, I'm going to start with this particular project to give a sense of what kinds of processes and politics we're informing the work that I'll show after it. I started playing the massively multiplayer role playing video game World of Warcraft in 2006. A version of the game that veteran while players here might know as vanilla anybody. No, okay. Or silently just keeping it to themselves. That's fine. After years of playing in competitive guilds and feeling frustrated with how my social experience differed from men I regularly played with. In 2012 I decided to do something about it. I become tired of being told to get back in the kitchen and make male player sandwiches. I become incredibly uncomfortable with the number of male players aggressively soliciting me for sexual interactions as soon as they realized I was a woman. After years of working in public performance grassroots activism and collective organizing I thought I could use this background that I had and apply it to this virtual public space and directly talk to players about why the community have become so homophobic, misogynistic and racist in its public communication channels. At least on the US servers that I've been playing on. So from 2012 to 2016 I created performative interventions inside World of Warcraft. So instead of killing enemies and getting badass equipment like I had for six years prior to its founding as the council on gender sensitivity and behavioral awareness in World of Warcraft I started traveling to highly populated virtual towns in the game to discuss the ways in which women were treated in the game space with other players. Again WoW has had a player base that at the time and I would say still is notorious for being quite hostile toward women, members of the queer community and people of color and this was again especially true on the servers that I primarily played on. In sessions with the council players came together in these public spaces to discuss inclusivity, entitlement, who gets to ask questions about the community's actions and language, harassment, why certain marginalized players were treated so poorly in the space, the feminism, why the politics of everyday life ended up so embedded in exchanges in this otherwise fantasy landscape where you can play as orcs, trolls and cows and so much more. The project shifted an intention from initially wanting to completely change the communal language in the space to fit something that was more affirming to me but ultimately I realized that this was also a colonial impulse and started shifting toward trying to create a presence and public visibility for the issues of exclusivity that players faced in the space by meeting and talking about it regularly. So we started just kind of literally taking up space and altering the game experience with these underrepresented perspectives that were otherwise silenced within the community. The project over time gained a large in game following and an intentional inclusive guild was created as a part of these discussions on the primary server I operated on. My biggest goal from the start was that this project could create a prototype or set of tactical guidelines for productive performative actions of protest by others in WoW and also other multi-user virtual environments. If it wasn't clear, this is some video documentation from one of the meetings of the council. This is sort of a fast description of the project. There's a whole lot of nuance and a lot of self-criticality missing. If you are interested in some of those elements and some of the background and politics and process from the project, I wrote an essay called Why Talk Feminism in World of Warcraft, which also has a lot of video documentation from the project as well, and it's available widely online. Writing is a big part of my practice, so every project I do usually has some kind of written component along with it. So in the midst of that long-term project, I started another one, which was also focused on facilitating dialogue within niche internet communities that are not inclusive to women and bringing together very disparate perspectives. So starting in 2014, I became interested in a figure named Roush Vee. His writing and his ideology started coming up during conversations with WoW players who identified themselves to me as men's rights activists or members of the manosphere. In case you're not familiar, Roush Vee is a professional pickup artist or now he's sort of reframed himself as a professional seduction coach, but he's been called the most infamous misogynist on the internet and he has a lot of competition for that title as you might know. Thanks. Roush Vee spends his time traveling around the world teaching men how to perform in particular ways in order of sex with as many women as possible across geographic language and cultural barriers as quickly as possible. He writes a series of seduction-centric travel guides called Bang, Day Bang, Bang Iceland, Bang Poland, and so on. One of his community fans made this image, not me. After reading so much of his writing for his devoted community of followers, one thing really stuck out to me. In Roush's accounts of his sexual exploits, the perspectives of the women he's explicitly talking about in great detail in his books and blogs are never represented. So I decided that I wanted to create a web and book project through which I'd hope to give the potentially hundreds of women Roush Vee's had sexual exchanges with using the extremely aggressive strategies outlined in his books and blogs an opportunity to anonymously report their experiences. After pursuing mainstream media distribution of my call for these women, it occurred to me that Roush knew about my project as he wrote about it on his Twitter account. His awareness of the project changed it for me. He became less of this sort of abstract villain that I was free to run a sphere campaign on and more of a complex person and more of a subject. I decided that I should stop mimicking the shock media tactics that his own community would use for definitely different ideological purposes, but still and move toward investigating further into actually trying to understand the tactics within his community, his personal motivations and the appeal that he and his practice held for his growing community of followers and ideally come up with systems to respond to it. And many of this community of followers later became what's politically called the alt-right or part of it. So I pursued getting Roush Vee to do an interview with me via Skype. This took months of email negotiating. The video interview ended up being unintentionally two hours long and was very exhausting. I'm going to play two short clips from the interview to give you a sense of what it was like. I will say there is some sexually explicit talk in this clip. So if you're uncomfortable with hearing Roush Vee talk about female orgasms, now would be the time to leave because he will. Okay. I like that Mark, I like it. Each book is basically trying to help men learn how to meet women and initiate sexual relationships. How to start a conversation with a woman, how to build a traction with a woman, how to get out into bed. If you don't mind, I do want to read a section from Bang that maybe you could sort of respond to because I think based on what you're saying, some of the things I did in Bang are really a more extreme version of what you're practicing now. You may be trying to play in this kind of context, try it again, or you can close it. I know, I'm sorry, I don't want to tell you just how to deal with it. Let's see, because I know that's what people have done to help women. I just want to, I'll let you respond to it because I don't, I don't want you to, you know, get upset. This is just called, if you don't feel like you're thinking you're not pushing hard enough. Yeah, this is the big start. I get like, you know, I'm not trying to exploit you, I'm just, she's not going to invite you upstairs like in the movies. She's not going to tell you she won't set sides with you. She's not going to grab your ticket and put it in. You must always be making the first move and always be pushing. If you're scared, she'll think of you as a creep. That means you're on the right path. Remember that girls who like you are required to be honest with them. So moving quickly is an indirect way of showing interest that can be helpful for new relationships. Get her to your place or her is the same that you need her. Get her into the bedroom. Take off her clothes and keep going. And she resists, take a break and start over again. Break her down and hang hard and then take her out and hang her again. And then on page 90 something. Now I have a way like a jack camera until she gets tired and gives in. This is when an elevator approach but it works. Only human resistance can be broken down without pressure. I just feel like there's a little bit more extreme than what you were explaining earlier. Thank you. How could I not be in the middle of the comments? Let's imagine that I do somehow find 20 women who have slept with you. What do you think he's going to say about the selection process and your sexual performance? I would say that I would be able to be able to calmly explain that I approach them with a good energy. If I didn't spend it as scary then I'd be able to get all comfortable and even become really strong. At the same time I'd become a special energy that I'd get more interested in. I'm really good at keeping the conversation going even if it was not even a lot of it. I make everything feel natural. I touch and kiss and I mean it's never, it's rarely a performance where a girl would have to stop and say no I can't touch you there because I can read and I know but based on how they act, how they talk, how they move when they want me to do the next step and after sex I get lazy because now I already got most of what I wanted so I just want to go to have the lowest possible expectations so I don't want to try so it's actually a blessing and a curse to be good at bed but I'm not. You mentioned your orgasm is of primary importance and that you don't go down on women. That's true. Can I ask why? Because nature has deemed the male orgasm to be more important. If right now a magic cloud of gas surrounds the earth and infected girls and prevented them from ever having a female orgasm again the human species would go on still but if this cloud of gas only affected men and prevented the male orgasm what would happen? The human species is done is freaking done therefore nature not me, nature has declared that the male orgasm is essential to life to life but the female orgasm is like a cherry on top if she gets it, hey, that's great yummy, but if not it doesn't matter I believe in what nature has said about it Oh, the things that have been said in defensive nature What is it? Does you know if feminist manifesto change nature? Okay, an aside. The text in this video is from one of the many emails that I got nearly daily over the course of this project from Roush's community members The project ended up taking a lot of unusual turns and a lot of unusual forms Roush was initially enthusiastic about my search on the project in general likely because of the media attention it gave him what he was quite uncomfortable about However, he and his community became increasingly frustrated over time that the media still had an overall negative view of Roush despite me posting an unedited two hour long interview with him in mainstream media His community began to harass me and additionally sent me rape and death threats over email, social media, comment sections of mainstream news sites and a massive and still ongoing comment thread on the Roush V community forum and additionally wrote threatening statements to collaborators, employers, friends, peers and colleagues in an attempt to discredit what I was doing I'm not talking about this issue to play up a victim narrative as I recognize myself as an artist with agency who started this whole thing but as a performer who had seen real impact on the space in World of Warcraft as a result of my actions as the council I naively applied some of the same logic and strategies to this project without realizing the primary difference in my position in these two spaces In World of Warcraft I was recognizable as a long-term high-level member of the community with high-level gear only obtained through years of commitment to the game clearly a participant and not an outsider by virtue of just being myself on the baseline a woman with a job I was always going to be an outsider in the manosphere that I was going into here we'll let this play out for a second if you're not familiar with the acronym WNB that's would not bang so thanks M alright normally I say more about this but if you do end up trying to follow me on Twitter you might find that my account is now private this is all related to this and now you know but I'm sure that all of you will make it through my vetting process so follow okay so toward the end of this bang project my individual pursuit of this somewhat Sisyphusian exchange with Roushvi and the online manosphere community felt riddled with the symptoms of the artist as hero slash savior complex perhaps internalized from formative years spent working for tactical media artists who I admire like the yes men I became more and more critical of my own processes and instead of ignoring the blind spots I decided to fold them into the project acknowledging them in a variety of project manifestations including multimedia storytelling performances art installations videos an interactive dungeon crawler video game and quite a lot of writing and this shift in politics and self-criticality led directly into the research and form for the game the game toward the end of the bang project something I felt was getting in the way of the work was my my own performance role the project became very much about my personal experience operating in the field despite my somewhat bad experience I haven't abandoned this field as you'll see in this project I'm just putting myself out of the spotlight and making the project less about my personal mediation of an intervention into this space and more about creating an embodied way for people to digest experiences from and ideologies of these manusphere seduction communities there's so much information so many micro communities and a lot of inaccessible lingo in this field and a lot of the tactical information is very painful to process especially if you're a woman and so with all of the experience I now have in this field as a researcher I felt like I was able to put myself in the position to filter it all into a game scenario so that one might actually walk away being able to make sense of it without having to spend as much time as I have and potentially develop strategies to respond to it so this brings me to the game the game which we'll play through together in a moment at least part of it after the bang project followers of other seduction gurus reached out to me to tell me that Rouge V's variety of pickup art was much more extreme and much more misogynistic than other types that they argued were more focused on teaching men self-confidence encouraging them to pursue self-improvement to help level the dating playing field I thought that this was a valid point and that something like this should exist so I decided to take a deeper look into the variety of pickup artists gurus or professional seduction coaches and the differences between the types of pickup art they're teaching and then ultimately make a playable experience or video game about them I'm just going to say that the rest of this talk there are definitely mentions of practices that look like sexual assault and definitely evidence of non-consensual behavior so if you're sensitive to your experience trauma around these things and want to leave at any time I won't be offended at all because I completely understand so the project's title the game the game is a play on the best selling book by Neil Strauss the game which was the first mainstream primer into this world which originated as a couple of guys with a web 1.0 online community forum sharing tips with each other on how to pick up women and ultimately turned into a seduct sorry a lucrative seduction coaching lifestyle for some it's sort of a playable version of the game but looking at the entire field and also the field as it's emerged today in more recent internet technology so not just the pickup artist represented in that book in developing the game the game I present the different seduction techniques of famous pickup artists and allow those pickup artists to speak for themselves through their work and put players into the situation of interacting with them in the most common location of a bar players regardless of personal gender identity are put into the position of experiencing a common scenario that them presenting people experience having their personal space invaded when it's unwelcome by men who feel entitled to it the first pickup artists you encounter in the game is Julian who is designed primarily from research material from infamous pickup artists Julian Blanc's first major multi DVD screening program PIMP this is what the program cost today now at a drastically reduced price all of the dialogue by the pickup artists in this game is constructed from their actual word for word advice written by these pickup artists in their books websites DVD programs and video conferences and also situations from their own hidden camera footage that they sell to their devoted followers online a lot of these coaching materials are prohibitively expensive and not available in full online I hypothesize that this is not only to make a bunch of money off of them but also to keep people who aren't looking to learn from them from finding out about them but I got some grants so I bought so many of them so thanks university anyway I really mean that I'm going to show an example of an excerpt from one of Julian Blanc's videos including an infield hidden camera video I'm just again going to give a little bit of a warning about this it's not graphic it's not overly sexual or pornographic it's just disturbing non-consensual behavior so I'm just going to put that out there this is a short excerpt from Pimp so when I'm like you know what after-party let's go I'm even putting the word now after-party now both and I would order and command now now listen you don't have to if you don't want to but let's go now we get along right after-party now adventure now let's go now this second now this second now I'm going to put that shit in I'll also do like you know what after-party because otherwise I have to go okay it has to happen now okay so keep that in mind take the responsibility out of the girl and create a sense of urgency please no we're very responsible no no but Julian is a we have some questions what do we have in common what do you mean she won't see that's what she said okay real fast oh my god okay we already kissed we already kissed redemption it's like a video game are you going to cheat on a shitty kiss that's a good point am I going to cheat on a shitty kiss you already cheated you cheated on a shitty kiss is that really what you want what are you guys coming from I'll get you a bite okay see what it is see what it is kiss me no no no can I use my friend's talker so this pretty much covers you know like aligning the emotional side of her brain with the logical side of her brain alright so I showed that video to illustrate that this moment presented in Julian's hidden camera footage is represented in the game as a player if you continue to engage with him to the point that you end up outside of the bar and are invited to leave the venue with him even when you push back you may be physically moved around and touch sexually without your consent this is not me inventing what Julian is like in any way but presenting him his behaviors in the way that he is presented them himself and has suggested them as a template for his many hundreds of thousands of online fans to follow it's really important that in the context of this DVD program this is packaged as a success this is a this was a good interaction this is proof that this kind of practice works so if you can imagine the many hundreds of thousands of people that are following this practice you know it's not a great feeling especially if you've had experiences that resonate with this this dedication to accurately representing the strategies and language of each pickup artist is also why the game the game took three and a half years to make just some images after each interaction in the game you're prompted with a series of options generally the options include a tonal range from being enthusiastic we're going along with it to being snarky to being polite to resorting to being aggressive in your rejection each option results in a different outcome illustrating how the pickup artist has described ways of handling the different ways that women respond to them each pickup artist handles rejection and women's attitudes differently for example and this is a bit of a spoiler alert but if you play through you'll notice that Julian will persist until you physically push him away so as we play through together if you want Julian to go away as soon as you physically push him away he will as a safety for all of you playing through that's a way to get him away whereas even the slightest hint of gratitude or confidence will signal to Luke that you aren't submissive and therefore aren't worth his time and he'll leave you immediately and Roushvi is called Luke in this game because he was caught by talk show hosts in Russia using a pseudonym name of Luke so I honored that in my game structurally the game the game follows the mystery method M3 model originally designed by Eric Von Markovic a pickup artist also known as mystery so all the pickup artists in the game the game have adopted mysteries M3 model in their own practices and coaching materials and they've each tweaked it a bit to establish their own brand on it and then sell it this diagram breaks down the model and I'll talk about a little bit so you can understand how it guides the game's timeline when we play it so broken into three stages attract, comfort and seduce this model outlines a pickup art hypothesis of structurally what needs to happen for a successful conquest to take place so in the game the game the attract phase includes pickup lines and a quickly establishing the pickup artist's quirky general vibe also during the attract phase they do value demonstrations by showing how unimpressed they are by their targets so this is also known as something you may have heard of called negging and also providing proof from other people in the room that they're socially valuable so finding a stereotypically interactive woman in the room and establishing that they know them somehow the pickup artist then waits for their target this is their language or the woman to show an indicator of interest in their world this means touching their hair making sustained eye contact starting to initiate conversation rather than just answering the pickup artist's questions being receptive to being touched by the pickup artist and ignoring their friends to talk to the pickup artist things like this after that the pickup artist will try to move into the comfort stage by physically isolating their target so moving them away from their friends to a farther part of the bar sometimes even physically convincing them to go to a different location with them like another bar a diner or made up after party that just ends up being their house and starting to physically connect via a term that they call Kino which basically just means repetitive touching that becomes more sexual in nature over time so moving from a shoulder touch to hugging to hand holding to kissing and so on after they've isolated their target in a comfort building location they attempt to bounce them to the sex location which could be their place their target's home a bathroom a vehicle etc and then the final stages of seduction occur a very large amount of pickup artist writing is devoted to overcoming what they call last minute resistance which is basically the moment in a sexual exchange when the target says they aren't comfortable with what's happening a.k.a. a clear no each pickup artist has their own strategy for getting past that moment and plowing through to sexual intercourse so following the structure as a player and as a target of pickup artist attention you can make a broad range of decisions in the game the game from opting to hook up with different pickup artists in multiple locations to attempting to get away from them immediately in constructing the game I didn't want to make the point necessarily escape and I hope that players if they aren't traumatized by it do experiment with seeing what a successful conquest looks like from the perspective of each of the pickup artists the game never slut shames the player by any means and also allows you to turn the tables and pursue the pickup artists yourself I've tried to depict not only the breadth of the field of pickup art in the game but also the extent to which each of these gurus copy their moves from each other highlighting how community based and internet driven the men's seduction field is each pickup artist has his own online community forum where participants share their experiences using the strategies proposed by these pickup artists so here you have the old my TV is working but we could use the computer in my bedroom routine and then you have Julian's version which involves a vampire diaries video you should see and mystery or Eric Von Markov's version which is I wanted to show you something in Google Earth which says maybe date this a little bit but yeah as you play through more and more exchanges and interact with more and more pickup artists it becomes clear that each pickup artist is really building off of the content of another one's materials and tweaking them the game was made from hundreds of handmade and digitally manipulated cyanotypes let's see some here this is what it looks like when they're combined and altered digitally and then put into Python and RENPIE I really wanted the game to have a feel to it that was consistent with the emotional and psychological weight of the experience so I brought back some of my background and more traditional art processes rather than employing the all digital sprite based RPG look I originally planned also the band Shushu composed the soundtrack to the game the game so it has this dark and intense musical score which I think enhances the tense claustrophobic nature of a lot of the interactions and environments which you'll get to here in a minute it's been shown primarily in art exhibition and festival contexts at this point but the goal has always been widespread online distribution through a platform like Steam which is still in the works and I also want to say despite the heavy way I've described the work it's actually also at times quite funny for example Julian is obsessed with Twilight and the Vampire Diaries series and a great deal of his pickup lines are vampire oriented and Roush has this odd story he tells about living off the land and growing only butter lettuce and organic watermelons it's important to me that the game doesn't just highlight the danger embedded in these scenarios I think it definitely does but also the absurdity of some of the tactics as well the game gives you an opportunity to slow down these practices and examine them closely something one definitely cannot do when they're experiencing them in an actual bar I frame the field in this heavy way for my talk because sometimes this field seems easy to dismiss as not real and when I talk about the field and the work I wanted to share with you some of the gravity of it by seeing it in practice I'm interested in exploring the complexity of these spaces and not flattening them or oversimplifying them in the way that mainstream media does and instead mapping them out and making their complexities more accessible by making these pickup art practices and embodied experience and putting players into the position of making decisions and walking through interactions I think there are insights to be gained that wouldn't be gained by for example writing a novel about the field the game comes in 97,000 words and if you played through every possible scenario it's the length of a 400 page book so maybe that was an option but for me there's something important about being put into the position of experiencing these practices rather than reading about them from a distance this is how I'm thinking about tactical embodiment which was also the title of this talk a strategy of positioning players into an embodied experience that may give them knowledge about this male seduction field by moving through them in a way through which it will sink in differently than reading about it in the abstract I think that understanding these practices and why they're so appealing and perceived as a necessary antidote for so many men is instrumental in trying to dismantle them there's a lucrative industry devoted to providing men with answers on how to get women to interact with them unfortunately many of these pickup artists have a monopoly on providing these answers as they strategically market their products on online bodybuilding forums and men's self-improvement sites knowing where to find these desperate clients who they then bleed dry while promising quick results these pickup artists practices fundamentally disregard consent and women's agency and also rely on very outdated ideas around biological determinism making assumptions about what women are naturally like that undermine the wide spectrum of ways that people present live and perform okay so now I'm done with the talking part we're going to play through it together and I'm going to walk you through I think I have hopefully 15 minutes to walk through this oh yeah nice you just held up a 15 okay so I'm just going to set my timer for 15 minutes and then I'm going to load up the game the game for us and again if we won't really get to play through any of the truly sexually explicit scenarios so and I already gave you some hints on how to avoid Julian Blanc so there's that okay timer okay I'll actually make it a little shorter we'll do like 13 minutes okay gonna open it up one second I have to duplicate my display don't look at my desktop okay cool here we go it's gonna happen alright I'm just gonna check the preferences really quick so this is the shoo shoo soundtrack that you're hearing already setting up I'm gonna turn it down a little so I can talk over it okay so the game right away opens with a a little bit of some context to help you understand what you're about to get into I never want somebody to play this without some idea of what they're going into so so how we're gonna play this together when we get to a sort of branching narrative point like this I'm gonna say one two or three and then all over you are gonna yell out thank you for deciding to continue this experience that would have been really anticlimactic if we didn't okay um so and just yell out if I'm going clicking through a little too fast one or two oh no oh steam oh that's how many embarrassing things can happen to me in a talk tonight okay one or two one thank you one two three or four I heard some very enthusiastic threes so that kind of night and this section is really to help you understand the interface and how to play in a certain way one two three or four a lot of four one two or three one two three or four one two three or four one two three or four two okay one two three or four one two or three one two one two three four or five that was pretty unanimous one two or three one two three or four two one two three or four four one two three four or five one two three or four One, two, three or four. Time's up. That's not really working, I thought it would. No, okay. Thanks for playing. Unfortunately, we don't have time for the Q and A's, but you will be here, I guess. Yeah, alright. Okay, let's give another warm round of applause for our speaker, Angela Wastl.