Artist Statement

Game On is an interactive performance (and installation) where players drawn from the audience use joysticks to control the movement of two boxers (human performers) via a MIDI-controlled electric muscle stimulation device. This device sends electrical impulses to specific muscle points on the boxers via electrodes connected to their arms, causing them to punch their opponent involuntarily.[1] The way the players control the boxers in Game On is similar to the way a gamer would move a joystick to control an avatar in a virtual fighting game. When the player moves the joystick, the boxer moves involuntarily and throws a punch.

The work is a creative enquiry into the nature of agency within a system where cognition is distributed across people, objects and environment through technologies of connection.[2] Our sense of agency is created through actions, and the actions of others influence our understanding of ourselves as separate from them.[3] In the Game On system, the boxer is connected to their player by an electrical network (akin to neurological signals) such that the player’s embodied experience extends to include their boxer. This expansion of agency entails a form of cognition that exceeds the boundaries of the nervous system. Game On explores what happens when embodied experience and sense of agency is disrupted or extended, and the implications of this for locating a responsible agent within this system. (i.e. whom, or what, is actually boxing?).

Questioning both the motivations of the players (who are subjecting the boxers to punches and electric shocks) and the culpability of the boxers (who are complicit in the violent act by relinquishing control of their limbs in order to be remotely controlled to punch their opponent), the work references Milgram’s 1960s psychological experiments on obedience. These experiments demonstrated that participants were prepared to administer increasingly painful electric shocks to another human if instructed to do so by a figure of authority.[4] Game On explores the role of the artist, who occupies a position of power not dissimilar to the experimenter in the Milgram study, [5] and conceptions of artistic activity which may permit the artist to explore practices in direct tension with society’s norms.[6]

The Game On installation design is based on a scene from the 1970’s cult classic Future World, where human players control android boxers. Replacing avatars/androids with real people, Game On challenges the disassociation from violent acts that players experience within a virtual game environment and the ethical challenges faced by society as technology advances to a point where the level of realism in ‘games’ becomes indistinguishable from reality. Game On makes real the speculative science fiction of Future World and in turn asks questions about the spectacle of violence & entertainment in the future. michaeladavies.net/game_on.html

1. Electric muscle stimulation mimics the impulses sent to muscles from the central nervous system, which cause the muscles to contract.
2. Participatory artworks like Game On can be viewed as a form of performative research, which do not only represent possibility, but enact possibilities in real time and space. Fleming, C. (2002). Performance as Guerrilla Ontology: The Case of Stelarc. Body and Society 8(3), 95–109.
3. Jeannerod, M. (2006). Motor cognition: What actions tell the Self. Oxford University Press.
4. Milgram, S. (1963) Behavioural Study of Obedience. Journal of Abnormal and Social Psychology 67(4), 371–8.
5. In both situations the participants assume that the authority figure (artist or experimenter) knows what they are doing. Eysenck, M.W. (1994). Perspectives on Psychology. Hove, England: Psychology Press.
6. Macneill, K., and Bolt, B. (2011). The ‘legitimate’ limits of artistic practice. Real Time Magazine, 104, Aug-Sept, 26-27

• Michaela Davies is an Australian artist, musician and psychologist, and fuses these multiple disciplines in her work. Her work investigates sonic possibilities, human limits, and the nature of agency, using electric muscle stimulation and other methods to both obstruct and extend human capabilities. Over the last decade Michaela has amassed a catalogue of work around these themes, presented worldwide at galleries and festivals including the Museum of Contemporary Art Australia, Berlin Institute for Cultural Inquiry, London V&A, Beijing Media Art Biennale, Experimental Intermedia New York, Currents International New Media Festival, ISEA, Mona Foma Festival Hobart, and Sonica Festival UK where she was 2013 Artist in Residence. Michaela holds a Doctorate in Psychology from the University of Sydney, and is an Australian Music Centre represented artist. She has received a Creative Australia Fellowship from the Australia Council for the Arts, and in 2015 her work was awarded an Honorary Mention in Prix Ars Electronica (Austria) for Digital Musics & Sound Art. She has received grants from the Australia Council, Arts NSW, and National Science Week. Michaela’s creative practice is informed by an interest in the role of agency in creative processes, and the liminal space between didactic execution and free interpretation inherent both in musical performance and beyond. In addition to exploring sound in installation & performance, Michaela plays electric bass in numerous projects. michaeladavies.net