Kristin McWharter is a multidisciplinary artist. Currently she is examining how an embodied knowledge of social hierarchy is accessed in digital and virtual spaces, by exploring the possibilities of physical contact therein. Many of her immersive installations and participatory performances integrate novel technologies and unexpected material forms. Pulled by 20th century sports entertainment, collective decision making, and technology as a contemporary spiritual authority, she speculates on the potential of new liminal spaces to produce alternate methods for social interaction.

The Project

For the HCL residency McWharter is developing a simulation of the American game of football rendered as an immersive sculptural installation and viewer-inclusive performance, to study the boundaries of social intimacy and competitive spirit. The work synthesizes months researching the rise of sports entertainment throughout the 20th and 21st centuries, specifically how the storytelling of American football has come to shape current understanding of community, citizenship, and nationalism. She has been working through the unknowns of improvisation, chance, and athletic limitation. She has observed the same attraction in popular sports video games such as Madden as well as game mods where users change, alter, or manipulate how a game looks or behaves. This led her to wonder how a simulation in which American football is reimagined might reflect an emerging and collective feminist perspective on those same nationalist themes.

Research began in March of 2020 when speculations of how the pandemic would impact society were in their very early stages. Of particular interest to McWharter was the fate of major league sports; with the many customs and rituals of spectatorship suddenly seized in a moment of anticipation. In August of 2020, working with an AI developer, a first iteration of a functioning AI system was prototyped.

The next stage at HCL is an accelerant: workshops and discussions where participants begin contributing modifications to the simulation in real time. This process is essential to the emergence of a new interpretation of competitive play in football as collective action. The simulation at HCL will be exhibited in its current state as a part of these workshops as well as in more formal settings as a new media work, after a sufficient collection of communal modifications have been contributed.

Ultimately, the football simulations and the narrative arcs of sports indexed in this work open new access points to the conversation: America’s history of racism, anti-gender, and colonialism. In parsing the structural histories of America’s most lucrative sports enterprise, the research culminates in a novel media tool to imagine alternative strategies of competitive play and consensual violence that contend with American structural histories of oppression.

For more information or to sign up for upcoming workshops, visit the project’s website at https://football.kristinmcwharter.com/.

Artist Bio

Kristin McWharter is a visual artist with a focus on performative practice. Her work has been exhibited at The Hammer Museum and Walt Disney Concert Hall in Los Angeles, the Bangkok Arts and Cultural Center in Bangkok, Thailand, Museo Altillo Beni in Santa Cruz de la Sierra, Bolivia, and FILE Electronic Language Festival in the Cultural Centre of SESI in São Paulo, Brazil. She was in residency at the Banff Centre (Behavior Swarm: Exploring Performative Practices) in Alberta, Canada, and Crosstown Arts in Memphis, Tennessee in 2019, and at CultureHub in Los Angeles, California in 2018. Her work was recognized with Honorable Mention in the 2018 Prix Ars Electronica prize in Linz, Austria. She is Assistant Professor in Art & Technology Studies at SAIC and received her MFA from UCLA in Design Media Arts.

Web: kristinmcwharter.com
Instagram: @kristinmcwharter