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Gendering Systems

In Part 2 of a series on artists using digital systems to subvert gender and sexuality norms, Vienna Kim argues that women and the queer community have played an outsized role in shaping generative art games. Artists employ these mediums to challenge gender and sexuality norms, while creating inclusive spaces within the tech and gaming industries.‍

Thinking about generativity in terms of art that emerges from autonomous systems—and potentially human interaction—gives space for a profusion of visuals, poetry, music and games to be considered generative art. Much of this work has been produced independently of computers, combining procedures and human interaction with an element of randomness to produce variegated results in the vein of John Cage. More recently, generative art has become synonymous with code-based and algorithmic frameworks that produce random outputs upon mint—a narrow conception that consigns other generative systems to the periphery, including gaming systems. And yet, video game art shares a rich history with generative art, with artists such as Cory Arcangel and JODI historically blurring the lines between genres. Notably, many twentieth-century generative and game artists were women and perhaps not without reason.

This lesser-known prominence of women and queer artists in the history of video game art may stem from the opportunity for worldbuilding—the ability to create one’s own virtual universe where current hegemonic systems can be turned on their heads.
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In game building, artists set the laws of the land.

Working with games as a medium has increasingly allowed artists to directly address themes of (a)sexuality and gender. Artists such as Gabriel Massan and La TurboAvedon reappropriate gaming culture to subvert and critique the often hyper-masculine domain within the historical narrative of video game art.

These artists build upon the legacies of early video game artists such as Rebecca Allen, Copper Giloth and Robert Yang, champions of feminism and inclusivity in gaming. Allen’s practice explored technology's intersection with gender and identity since the mid-1970s, while Giloth emphasized gaming and its societal implications. Finally, Yang used art games to critically examine digital spaces as queer spaces. Their work exemplifies the act of co-opting generative and gaming systems to critique our broader socio-political structures. Through their work, they advocate for diversified and safer spaces in the tech and gaming industries for people of various sexualities and genders. Their experiences reveal to us a uniquely gendered view of generative art that divulges their struggles as a gender minority in a male-dominated tech sector. They also provide a lens through which we can view, understand and ultimately subvert the social systems in which we live today.
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Rebecca Allen

‍Throughout her career, Allen interrogated the feminine sensibility within computer systems with striking defiance. She began integrating feminist approaches to both her artistic practice and technological research in her earliest work as a student. In 1974, she created her first computer-aided drawings at the Rhode Island School of Design (RISD) by “infiltrating” Brown University’s computer lab, as Allen described to Serpentine Gallery. Painfully aware of her status as the only woman and artist in the room and “not taken seriously,” her earliest computer work—Flirt and Girl Lifts Skirt (1974)—explored feminist concepts with biting commentary on the pervasive patriarchy in the development of digital technology.
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Amongst the earliest computer-animated artworks of all time, Girl Lifts Skirt portrays a female figure from the waist down only, slowly lifting her garments to reveal her garter-adorned thighs and underwear. The seductive and sensual movements of the woman in this work—cheeky, playful and subversive—provide what is perhaps one of the first artworks that offers a ‘female gaze’ of computational aesthetics.

Allen’s experience in the gaming industry in the ‘90s presented similar challenges to the ones she had faced as a student. She told Serpentine, “It was a pretty horrible experience to be a woman working in the games industry in the early 1990s. I had foolishly thought I’d come in and add a new form of art or perspective and not just make first person shooter games, but forget it, so I left after two years.” Disillusioned yet determined, she began creating her own gaming software, Emergence, focusing on interactive, generative and AI-integrated art.

Displaying her signature courage to resist, Allen created her Bush Soul Series with this custom software, acting as a precursor to future explorations in queer theory. Bush Soul Series examines the dichotomy of the human soul in relation to our physical versus digital bodies and the “artificial life” that emerges when we inhabit and perform our avatars. Such approaches are echoed in Legacy Russell’s 2020 manifesto, Glitch Feminism, where she posits that a “glitched” body is one that does not prescribe to gender binaries; it is an errant within our current hegemony. She states, “Through the digital, the body ‘in glitch’ finds its genesis. … It creates a homeland for those traversing the complex channels of gender’s diaspora. The glitch is for those selves joyfully immersed in the in-between, those who have traveled away from their assigned site of gendered origin.” Russell developed Allen’s initial explorations of multiplicities of identities (bush souls) and envisioned a “glitched body” whose queer soul exists AFK (Away From Keyboard), yet comes to its fullest form within the digital.

Creating one’s own game engine, like Allen’s Emergence, serves as both an ideal platform for exploring gender concepts and a powerful act of resistance. Emergence’s accessibility, emphasis on interface and flexibility as a tool meant users could create and control immersive, interactive 3D environments without depending on a specific programming language. It provided access to a wider group of people than the predominantly male computer scientists. This feminist act of creating new spaces, interfaces and tools for those who existed outside of the male-dominated commercial gaming industry is one of Allen’s greatest legacies; it was a mission shared by artist Copper Giloth as well.
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Copper Giloth

‍Like Allen, Giloth’s work challenged the male-dominated tech and gaming industries, spotlighting their pervasive misogyny. Around the same time Allen began creating her first computer animations in the 1970s, video games appeared. The release of this novel interactive form resulted in Giloth’s From Video Games to Video Art, which debuted at Video Art: The Electronic Medium at the Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago. The piece was even featured on national television for CBS News.
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One of the first video games to specifically express itself as a work of art, From Video Games to  Video Art, calcified Giloth as a founder of game art. The piece integrates a series of plotter drawings into an interactive experience on a computer, where viewer-players use a joystick and buttons to compose their own digital drawings. The artist created a system of parameters that, through audience participation and the multitudes of possibilities for the combination of symmetries that allowed for more complex final outputs, resulted in randomized generative creations. Like Allen’s Emergence, the work provided an engaging and accessible way for anyone to make artwork with computers.
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Giloth was particularly concerned with questions of who could access emerging technologies and how these forces prejudiced society and culture. Giloth’s status as a woman working with video games illuminated the problematic feedback loop of the faults and biases embedded in society and the development of digital technologies. The enduring misogyny she observed inspired her to create Modeling the Female Body: A Survey of Computer Generated Women 1980–1993 (1994). In the video work, the artist observed over 200 hours of SIGGRAPH footage, extracting the moments that included representations of women and stitching them together. She expressed: “I entered the field of computer graphics in 1978; over the next 16 years I had the opportunity to observe how women’s bodies were imaged and constructed in computer graphics in the areas of science, engineering, visualization, advertising, entertainment, and art. I was always bothered by the stereotypical images of women and how these scientists and researchers used computer generated women’s bodies to sell products or demonstrate a new feature in computer graphics.” In the piece, Giloth alerts us to the age-old trope of women’s bodies being a site—a battleground—of sexual objectification for the means of entertainment or marketing, a trend Danielle King for Le Random worryingly sees manifesting itself today.

The depiction of women in various states of undress, literally in chains or as female cyborgs seemingly available for sex, presents a shockingly clear picture of misogyny in the tech world. Regrettably, the artist believes little has changed in the thirty years since the video’s first release: “Now in 2021, I could do a new collection from the last 28 years, but I won’t because I don’t think the content would be much different.”
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In Modeling the Female Body, Giloth exposes the concerning misogyny within video game systems, ultimately alerting us that these computer-generated visions of women remain symptoms of sexism within our societal systems at large.
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Robert Yang 

While women such as Allen and Giloth were among the first to work with generative systems and game engines, Robert Yang has been making games about gay subcultures for over a decade. Yang employs interactivity and generative gaming to explore queer subcultures and the fine line between reality and virtuality. His work allows players to become co-conspirators in the political and social messages embedded in the games.

Yang’s impact results from navigating the edges between IRL and virtual life, permitting his viewer-players to become directly involved with the narratives and consequences of their actions in the game. In Cobra Club (2015), for example, characters simulate an avatar that takes and trades penis selfies with NPCs (non-playable characters) in the game. The game provides a space for viewer-players to engage in the act of swapping nudes safely without involving one’s own physical, identifiable body. Concurrently, the game comments on privacy and mass surveillance in the technocene, as players discover at the end of the game that their photos have been published to a Tumblr page without their awareness, effectively being ‘leaked’ without consent. The initial thrill of freely swapping nudes without consequence is betrayed by the game creator himself publishing the photos online, causing the player to critically question trust and online data security in an age of ubiquitous technology.
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Yang’s generative art game We Dwell in Possibility (2021) also actively involves viewer-players as co-creators in the work's political messaging. With illustrations by Eleanor Davis, the art game is a queer, browser-based gardening simulation that explores gay subcultures and allows viewers to create their own pastoral heavens (or hells). Users click and drag to paint flowers across a green field, while non-binary NPCs trickle onto the screen, bringing gifts of plants, tents, picnic baskets, Churchill statues and more. As the garden populates, the NPCs react to the objects within the scene, such as eating sandwiches from the picnic basket, taking a coffee from a stand, dancing, kissing, or even becoming a Tory upon observing the Churchill statue.
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As with Giloth's From Video Games to Video Art, the artist provides a simple, accessible and engaging system whereby players can create their own interactive artworks. At the core of this virtual visual orgy is a commentary on the visibility of queer subcultures, intimacy and the necessity of digital spaces for non-binary folk as an alternative to our present reality. By creating an interactive, generative game, Yang allows the viewer-players to play god. They are in control of the fate of these queer bodies seeking a safe space.

Whether players create a paradise for these NPCs or a disturbing replication of our increasingly fascist global reality, they are personally implicated in the creation of these worlds.
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This act of agency through co-creation prompts players to reflect on their real-world influences and actions towards queer communities.

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Gendering systems from micro to macro scale

‍Allen, Giloth, and Yang distinguish themselves among the many artists who have experimented with games and generative systems through their direct engagement with gender and sexuality. Their specific approaches offered intimate and poignant critiques on the importance of providing safe spaces for people of varied genders and sexualities in the tech and gaming sectors as well as society at large.

Their work also reveals a power of digital systems in art—whether algorithmic parameters or game engines—to critique the socio-political-economic systems that dictate our lives.



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Vienna Kim is a writer, curator and the Artistic Manager at Artpoint. She is particularly interested in works that explore gender and queer theory in video games and establishing agency around identity in the age of Technocapitalism.