Kristin McWharter

Artist’s Statement About the Work

Football Practice is a software simulation that delves into histories and cultural impacts of American Football. The work reflects on the various modes of storytelling within the sport and how these stories have come to shape current understanding of community, citizenship, and nationalism. Inspired by popular sports video games such as Madden as well as the practice game mods where users change, alter, or manipulate how a game looks or behaves, Football Practice uses simulation to challenge and reimagine how a game like football is practiced in society. Ultimately, the emergent narratives that form within the simulation and the narrative arcs of sports indexed through workshop conversations open new access points to parsing the structural histories of America’s most lucrative sports enterprise. The work is a new media tool to imagine alternative strategies of competitive play and consensual violence. Football Practice speculates on a future for the sport of American Football using live simulation software in addition to daily screen captures that are published as still digital images and prints.

In my artwork I draw inspiration from narrative structures that emerge from competitive play. The delicate nuances of negotiating contact and violence, The tender hollering of a crowd of synchronized spectators, the compulsory celebration of a local team’s big win... My work consists of immersive sculptural installations and viewer- inclusive performances that critically fuse folk games and improvisational play with virtual and augmented worlds. These narratives reveal a pulsing relationship between the complex rhetorical frameworks of citizenship and play within the American context and the poetics of what it means to be a “good sport”.

I am interested in the narratives that emerge from strategies of opposition and cooperation. Games of probability, zero-sum, evasion and pursuit, fortune telling, or snowball effect systems all offer unique poetic frames through which an audience interprets the meaning of actions taken. Inspired by 20th century sports narrative, collective decision making, and technology as a contemporary spiritual authority, I craft participatory performances that conjoin visitors into absurd games that form uniquely confrontational and yet sentimental unions. The particular form of storytelling that stems from sports narrative relies on the unknowns of improvisation, chance, and athletic limitations. Sports rhetoric has particular rhythms that swing viewer emotions from extreme enthrallment to utter dismay in a single play, but also often contain archetypes of heroes, villains, authority and subjugation that allow for broader discussions of contemporary socio politics to be projected onto the game. I am interested in looking at how the narrative elements of sport and play have contributed to our understanding of community, citizenship, conflict and its impact on the body in the American context.

Both conceptually, and practically, my studio practice is constantly shifting back and forth between digital and material modes of working as they each contribute towards how I attempt to engage my audience’s physicality in a state of play. I work with emergent narratives of competition and cooperation as a means to better understand how our learned cultural play can be manipulated to reveal the felt experience of our social contracts. Digital media has become a medium in which I experiment with the poetics of real time systems and emergent imagery that can respond to the behavior dynamics and body language of viewers. The software I develop poetically manipulates narrative structures of competition as a logical basis for how an image or a performance is produced. A simulation of a football team drawn from real world discussions on the cultural impact of American football; real time motion capture performance of an immortal cheerleader caught in a perpetual hype cycle; a projector that scans a virtual audience for what instigates “the wave”. These works meditate on the aesthetics and implications of the stories we tell ourselves in our play.

— Kristin McWharter