Poking the Hive: Interventions in Unusual Media Environments
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 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 after reality television.
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 The Game: The Game is a video game presenting the practices of several prominent seduction coaches (aka pick-up artists) through the format of a dating simulator. In the game these pick-up gurus attempt to seduce the player using their signature techniques taken verbatim from their instructional books and video materials.
Sponsors
Critical Technology Studies @ NCSA
School of Art & Design Visitors Committee