The Mixer: The Ultimate Sk8 Activity Centre

The Mixer: The Ultimate Sk8 Activity Centre, Sandee Moore, plywood, video, interior latex paint, interactive electronics, PlayStation 1, TonyHawk's Pro Skater 2, (custom level in Tony Hawk's Underground added in 2022) 2001 & 2022

The Mixer installation presents opportunities for viewers to be active and creative within the exhibition space. Several photo resistor sensors were embedded in the surface of the model of a 1/4 pipe. By moving over the surface of the ramp, the participant triggers a unique mix of audio samples from the video game Tony Hawk’s Pro Skater 2. I created an avatar to represent myself to players of the game, who could access stories from my history as a marginalized girl skater through playing the game. My character, L’il Sandee, is a boy. The game only allowed for the creation of male characters, which mirrored my experience of the homosocial skateboarding world.

Reflecting on this artwork over twenty years after I first created it, I became even more painfully aware of the innate sexism of the Tony Hawk Pro Skater video game series. Most of the female characters created by the game designers over multiple iterations of the video game are overtly sexy and scantily clad, while the sole female professional skateboarder represented in the game embodies an outright rejection (and devaluation) of femininity. I have turned statistics about gender representation in the five versions of Tony Hawk Pro Skater video game series into skateable objects. Instead of the original game's drab concrete and plywood aesthetics, the level I have created immerses players in a feminized environment of pastel tones and confetti sprinkles. The heights of the ramps I modeled to create this new level are based on gender representation in each release of the Tony Hawk's Pro Skater series. Additionally, I modeled skateable cis-female identified objects, such a menstrual cups, brassieres, tampons and pink razors, that both brings skaters into into contact with femininity and conveys that they are insignificant in the shadow of powerfully-represented femininity. (Imagine that Claes Oldenburg made a skateboard park of cis-female related consumer products.)