Georgie Roxby Smith

Georgie Roxby Smith

With unabashed humour, Georgie Roxby Smith scrutinises gender and identity constructs in the alternate realities of online game performance machinima. Through her critical play in Second Life, Smith subverts the stereotypes of machinima, where machine (real-time computer graphics) technologies are fused with cinematic production. Characteristically, Smith’s works emphasise glitch aesthetics and explore the soft boundaries between the real and the virtual. There is also an underlying fascination with the cyclical nature of a virtual existence, where entities can be eliminated and reanimated with the pulse of the power key.

IRL <I only exist on the internet> is a posthuman self-portrait where Smith’s avatar-self is positioned in a deconstructed, digital naturescape. The artifice of the virtual as eternal and boundless is exposed with the co-presence of artist-as-self, self as role-player and avatar. Digital mortality is asserted as the artist-as-self crumbles into a pixelated ground and the facial renderings of the avatar peel away to reveal teeth, gum and jaw. Even in the machine idealised beauty is subject to the limitations of a virtual biological lifespan. 

IRL <I only exist on the internet> 2020

Single channel, digital moving image (found footage of self, online game performance machinima), with sound 
Duration: 5:00 min loop