Interview: Ava Hofmann - The September Trilogy
For the third episode of Outside the Lines: A Line Rider Podcast, I interviewed Ava about the series of three tracks that make up The September Trilogy - My Pal Foot Foot, Know Thy Self, and on a day like this one. It was my first time doing any kind of interview, so I was pretty nervous, but I think it came out really well! And as always, this episode is also fully subtitled on the Line Rider Review YouTube. Enjoy!
BEVIBEL: Hello everyone! I am not Ava Hofmann - I am Bevibel Harvey, A.K.A. Rabid Squirrel, editor and producer of Outside the Lines, a Line Rider podcast where usually Ava interviews Line Rider creators and talks to them about the artistry behind their tracks. But today, I am going to be interviewing her!
Ava Hofmann is a published writer and poet whose work pushes into the visual, the multimodal, and the interactive. She began releasing Line Rider tracks in early 2021 after being inspired by vsbl’s Freaks. Deeply informed by her background in poetry, Ava’s Line Rider work has had an enormous impact on the Line Rider creative community in this relatively short period of time, with an approach that often centers language, social commentary, personal experience, and the conceptual over polish, technical execution, or craft. Ava is constantly challenging the Line Rider world to break new creative ground, reimagining what themes and narratives it is possible to tackle within Line Rider as an art medium, and what, if any, skill set is actually required to do so.
Today I am thrilled to be interviewing Ava about The September Trilogy, a series of three Line Rider tracks - My Pal Foot Foot, Know Thy Self, and on a day like this one, released over the course of 2022, that tell the story of September’s journey from childhood to adulthood through abuse, trauma, transition, and healing. It is a harrowing, but ultimately hopeful piece that shatters long-standing Line Rider conventions around art, movement, and storytelling - a work that is as deeply moving as it is unique. If you haven’t seen it yet, I would highly recommend you go watch it, though not before you prepare yourself to feel some heavy emotions.
BEVIBEL: Welcome to your own podcast, Ava!
AVA: Thank you for having me, thank you for having me. It’s such an honor to be here. [laughter]
BEVIBEL: You can probably guess what the first question is. In your own words, describe The September Trilogy. What is it?
AVA: So, The September Trilogy is a series of three tracks that I made over the course of nine months in 2022, that ended up each being part of an interlocking narrative of the main character, September, who we see in each track at a different stage of life. The three tracks are My Pal Foot Foot, Know Thy Self, and on a day like this one, and they correspond to childhood, teenager-hood, and young adulthood respectively. They were sort of a wild accident that festered in my brain for a long time.
It started with My Pal Foot Foot. I was listening to outsider music - an old name for the series, before I’d settled on “The September Trilogy”, was “Outsiders” - and I was listening to The Shaggs, who made the song “My Pal Foot Foot”, and I realized it had a narrative that I thought would be a really good Line Rider narrative. It’s like, you’re looking for your cat, you wander around the neighborhood, and then you find your cat. I was like, “Okay, I can make this.” And it could intentionally look really shitty, because the song is sort of accidentally shitty in an interesting way. But then, as I did more research on The Shaggs, and I started drawing, it became this very personal narrative about growing up and abuse. Around that time I had had a very difficult conversation with my mother, and it ended up coming through in that work. If you’ve seen My Pal Foot Foot, you know it ends in a very devastating, depressing way.
BEVIBEL: Yeah, it’s brutal.
AVA: The ending had to be that way for the track, but I was really unhappy that that was the ending for the character, and so I then got it in my head that maybe I could do a couple other tracks with this character I had drawn looking for this cat, and give them what they needed from life, instead of leaving her bereft. [laughter] And that’s how it started. Know Thy Self is even worse, because it’s, like, a whole narrative arc. When you push through and out of a cycle of abuse, that’s generally the lowest point a lot of the time.
BEVIBEL: It gets worse before it gets better.
AVA: Yeah. So, in on a day like this one I’m able to make a Line Rider track about healing, because I’ve done all this work in these other two tracks. And each one, like, I thought about it for a month, and it was like a haze in my mind over the course of two weeks when it was made. [laughter] I guess that’s sort of the disorganized gist of what The September Trilogy is - three interconnected tracks about the life of a person.
BEVIBEL: As I know you’re aware, historically, the vast majority of Line Rider scenery was created with a mouse, and usually the straight-line tool, with lines drawn one at a time. In your Line Rider work, you seem more drawn to using a tablet and the pencil tool to make these scribbles. A lot of your work has this very distinctive sketchy quality - BELLS is an early example of this, where you were sort of figuring out what you wanted to do with Line Rider. In The September Trilogy you really lean into this, and you use it as a way to create this really striking style - I would call it expressionistic. So, the question is, what drew you to this sketchy, tablet-based, scribbly approach?
AVA: So, I have talked about this before, in my video essay about Freaks by vsbl. Right at the very beginning, I was drawn to Line Rider work that leaned more towards a less perfectionistic style. There is this history of the best Line Rider art being the most pristine Line Rider art - it was a tendency for a long time. I’d paid attention to Line Rider for a while before I got into it, and the fact that everything was so perfect actually sort of put me off of it. I was like, “Well, I don’t think I can do something like that.” I think a lot of art is born from one’s own limitations, and a pretty big limitation I have is that I’m not a very neat person. I’m kind of messy and chaotic, and pristine stuff is actually unnerving to me [laughter] because it’s, like, outside of my conscious capacity. When I saw Freaks by vsbl, that was my first pathway in to being like, “Okay, maybe I can make a narrative in Line Rider,” because the other thing that’s important about Freaks is that the art can be sort of “meh” - even though the art is actually really great in my opinion - but the art can be messy, because there’s a narrative emotional reason for the messiness, which is this sort of schoolyard context, which really elevates what the track is doing, narratively and artistically. It made me realize, “Oh, maybe I can do something like that - telling a narrative - and it doesn’t have to be, like, perfect movement, perfect visuals, because it’s sort of about an emotional space, instead of a realist scene or a choreographed dance.” It’s a narrative, which I’m better at, because I’m a writer.
This is just to say - the scribbly style, as my general style in my tracks, was an intentional choice, born out of knowing that I wasn’t going to be good when I started out at Line Rider. I was going to be really crappy at it, but if I was crappy at it in a good way, right? [laughter]
BEVIBEL: Yeah, how can you use the crappiness to make something cool?
AVA: If you think about it, if you keep working in a medium, the shortest period of time in your life working in that medium is the period of time when you suck at it. So it’s actually a great opportunity, because it’s the only period of time in which you can make something that takes advantage of the fact that you suck, right?
BEVIBEL: Yeah [laughter] it’s true. I can’t do that anymore - it’s impossible!
AVA: Right - and it’s getting harder for me, too. I figured out movement, and it’s hard to not think about it - it’s hard to be like, “Eh, that’s good enough,” as I get better at things, and at drawing even, too.
Using the drawing tablet was sort of a happy accident. My poetry has a lot of visual elements, and I was trying to expand what kind of visual elements I could put into my poetry, so I was like, “Okay, I need a drawing tablet,” so that Christmas, before I started working on Line Rider, I had finally gotten a drawing tablet.
BEVIBEL: That would have been, what - two, three months?
AVA: Yeah, and it was like, “Well, the drawing tablet works, and I can use a drawing tablet on .com, so I guess I’ll do that!” Because using the trackpad would be way worse! [laughter]
BEVIBEL: As someone who didn’t have a tablet until mid-2021, it is so much worse. Trying to make it look like scribbles, when it’s not? Terrible.
AVA: Yeah - and I know there are some sociopaths who actually do use their trackpad to make things, like Jade! Like, the scribbles in Mount Eerie were made with a fucking trackpad! [laughter] I could not do that. And because I was a writer, and I doodle, it was much more immediately accessible to me to use a drawing tablet. Actually, I’d highly recommend anyone in Line Rider to get a drawing tablet. I think it’s a great asset that’s underutilized. I think drawing tablets have a reputation of being this weird, expensive, exclusive piece of hardware, when you can get a shitty Wacom for 50 bucks or less. It’s not, like, professional - you’re not, like, a graphic designer or whatever - it’s not that level - but it doesn’t need to be.
BEVIBEL: For Line Rider!
AVA: For Line Rider, especially not, right? So I’d really recommend it to people, because it really opens up a lot of things that you can do, because it lets you have that more immediate pen and paper experience with Line Rider, which I think is very helpful.
So I just kept leaning into that, because it was like, “I can do this, and it serves my artistic and narrative goals with Line Rider.” And I started exploring that more and more - like, in My Boy, the narrative is basically stealing from Freaks, that it’s also the doodle notebook of a teenage kid.
BEVIBEL: Except make it gay, right?
AVA: Except make it gay! It’s Freaks, but gay.
So I was already thinking about all of these things when I started working on My Pal Foot Foot. So, like I mentioned, one starting point for My Pal Foot Foot was, like, “Well, it’s a crappy song,” - I mean, I think it’s actually a really good song, I like that song - but it’s not a traditionally beautiful song, right? It’s sort of jarring, and dissonant, and arhythmic in a really wonderful way, and that already aligns very well with my aesthetic goals in Line Rider, which is to take things that are not considered beautiful in Line Rider, and to make them beautiful - to invert beauty hierarchies. [laughter] So I was like, “Yeah, this will fit great with my style!” And I’d been drawing more and more in Line Rider tracks - it went from doodles that were sort of isolated thingamabobs, like, “Oh, there’s a skull sitting here for whatever reason,” - like, the track before My Pal Foot Foot, Friends in Low Places, has a lot of scribbly drawing, and sort of a weird horror theme, so I had gotten way more comfortable with drawing scenes and narratives.
And one thing in Friends in Low Places, that is sort of an important precursor, is - it’s not executed very well, but there’s a moment with this puppet that appears, and it’s supposed to be playing some music, and then says goodbye, but it’s done in, like, a comic book format - stopping on each movement. The approach to characters, before this point, had been animation mostly. It’d been like, “Here’s a character who appears, and Bosh is moving very fast, so the character is just sitting there, and is animated, but Bosh isn’t doing any movement either,” so it was very static, right?
BEVIBEL: Yeah - Bosh is moving so fast that the whole screen is being animated, and then Bosh is kind of just suspended in stasis.
AVA: But at this point, I’d already been having a lot of conversations about how Line Rider is kind of like slow animation [laughter] with things like visualizers - that Line Rider is really best at this sort of continuous animation, not this frame-by-frame animation. And you and I had talked about One-Eyed Giant as well, and how One-Eyed Giant does a thing similar to what that puppet is doing in Friends in Low Places, and what the entirety of The September Trilogy is built on. It’s this idea where, like, if Line Rider is sort of this continuous animation, that doesn’t just mean you can do these sorts of visualizer things, it means you can do this thing where it’s a comic, almost - Bosh is moving by this character in time, and you get each frame of this character, and your brain is just like, “Oh, okay, this is time, even though it’s also space,” right?
BEVIBEL: I literally have a question that is all about this. Why do you think there is this gulf between One-Eyed Giant and The September Trilogy? Because there’s really very little of that comic-book style animation of, like, drawing a character and then “animating” the character in that style, where as you travel across, the way your eyes would travel across a comic book page, you see still frames of the character doing different things. That happened in One-Eyed Giant, and then no one did it - even though everyone loves One-Eyed Giant, it’s a classic! I’m curious if you have any thoughts on why there was One-Eyed Giant, and then nothing for 15 years?
AVA: I think there’s a few things that contributed to the motion comic thing being One-Eyed Giant, and then nothing. First of all, it requires you to link space and time in your head in a way that I think is maybe not immediately intuitive. Because it can feel contradictory when you’re you’re drawing the character three times - like, “Well, this scene doesn’t make sense.” I think there was a very strong tendency, early on, for an idea of Line Rider that was, like, it’s this scene - this static place - this environment that Bosh is moving through.
BEVIBEL: It’s this one large structure or world, and Bosh is just traveling through it, and it doesn’t change over time as the video moves forward.
AVA: Right, exactly - it’s a sort of static idea of what the scenery, and Line Rider, is. And even though people love One-Eyed Giant, I think people were sort of not prepared - I mean, a similar thing is, like, why didn’t anyone come up with vsbl’s Freaks, right? It takes an odd leap - I mean, it wasn’t even immediately apparent to me until I watched Freaks that you could stop imagining Line Rider as a space that Bosh is moving through and start imagining it as a piece of paper that Bosh is on. Maybe that’s obvious in retrospect, but I don’t think it is, because when you see the sledder, you’re not thinking, “motion comic,” you’re thinking, “Let’s make the little dude go down a hill,” right?
BEVIBEL: Uh huh.
AVA: It’s very weird, actually - psychologically - to make the leap to, “What if we were going down the hill of time?” [laughter] Very unhinged energy.
And I suspect there also might be a technical level to it. It’s very line intensive - the motion comic thing - at least the way I do it. I’m holding up my drawing tablet pen - this is the key to it - and this is maybe circling back to the scribbly-dibbly part of it, right? I think when you’re holding a tablet pen you’re more immediately like, “Oh yeah, I could draw a little character, doin’ a thing.” This idea didn’t completely not exist for those 15 years, it just didn’t exist very well. One-Eyed Giant was very good - but if you see, like, little kids’ Line Rider tracks - like, there’s that recent one, THE GREAT LINE RIDER RACE - it’s doing the motion comics thing, it’s just really bad! [laughter] It’s not a coherent narrative - it’s just a little kid going, like, “Oh, and then these cars are flying over here! And then there’s a UFO, and it’s blowing up some stuff! And people are running away, oh no! And Bosh got to the end of the the race!” And that’s great! I love that! But I think the people who sat down and were like, “I’m gonna make serious Line Rider art,” - which is very funny that people sat down, in general - from quirkers, to you, to me, it’s very funny each time someone does this [laughter] - I think they want to reject the little kid, right? Because they want to be serious. That’s maybe another element, right? And then, also, if you want to draw a really good character, it’s a pain. [laughter] And that’s why the drawing tablet is such a good pathway in.
And with my style, I’m drawing with marks that are made by my hand. I mean, they’re also made by my hand when I’m doing, like, a trackpad, or doing my mouse, but I’m using a pen stroke when I’m drawing with the drawing tablet, which I think is a key thing. You mentioned expressionism in the question, and, like, what was abstract expressionism, right - it was all about the idea of recording the actual physical marks that the painter was making. Jackson Pollock is the over-typified example of this - Jackson Pollock is, like, flingin’ paint at a canvas - and that’s sort of what you can do with scribbling. Again, it’s the Freaks thing where you’re watching a track that has a narrative, but, because you can see my human marks, there’s another layer to it - which I think is very important to The September Trilogy, and all of my work really - what I do with my lines can then mean it’s actually saying something about my psychological state, and my emotions, and me as a person, right? It’s actually very multi-layered. You get the emotion from Bosh’s movement, the emotion from the art, and you get the emotion from the awareness that someone made the art - which I think is less immediate when you’re using the straight-line tool, because it it kind of feels like, “Oh, a computer made this art,” even though that’s not true.
BEVIBEL: The artist is more invisible. It’s supposed to be, “This thing exists - how does it exist?” whereas, in Know Thy Self, you can see how it exists - like, I think about the end, with that box - there’s scribbles everywhere, and they’re so dynamic, and obviously drawn by a human hand, that you almost get a sense of what you were feeling - thinking about it, and drawing it - at the moment you were drawing.
AVA: Exactly. And that’s what’s really great about the scribble - it is doing all of these things when you use it in a thoughtful, artistic way. A scribble is this piece of art that’s emotional - a scribbly thing - but it also has this narrative information, where you can tell September is feeling a certain way in the narrative, when certain scribbles appear. Like, also in Know Thy Self, there’s this big “IDIOT” in red, which is clearly September’s internal emotions, because it’s so much bigger than her body and it’s so scribbled. You get the emotion of it, but then you also might feel like, “Oh, Ava’s communicating something about some of her emotions of negative internal thoughts,” right?
BEVIBEL: Yeah.
AVA: This is what I like about scribbles. And I like this in general in art - where I can see that someone has made it - because it lets us practice this really multifaceted empathy, that I just love. I really don’t understand art that tries to make the person who made it invisible. It’s like, “Isn’t art, like, about you and I?” I don’t know. And this is not to judge extremely perfect art - I admire it a lot, because I can’t do it [laughter] admittedly.
BEVIBEL: I mean, I feel the same way about your stuff! [laughter] Like, how do you take your feeling and just put it on the page?
AVA: It’s hard in its own way. You know, your hand gets tired. [laughter]
I just want my tracks to not be viewed as like a corporate product, which I feel like a lot of very perfect art... A lot of standards for what good art is, are oftentimes just what a good product is. I’m not really interested in making a good product - I’m interested in making a good piece of art. And although there’s plenty of great art that is also very clean, I feel like the emphasis on something that makes the labor of the artist invisible is representative of a culture that makes labor invisible in general.
BEVIBEL: I’m feeling called out, in a good way.
AVA: It’s not a call-out! It’s important in a lot of ways, just the fact that that’s considered the only or the best thing is the issue. Because there can also be something very beautiful and actually personal about making yourself invisible in the art.
BEVIBEL: I think you’re right - I think a lot of my work, for example, is, like, I’m making myself invisible, and in the process of doing that, people don’t know how I made it. It makes it into more of a product, where it’s something that just exists, and you’re like, “Where did this come from?” and the labor is, like, “What labor? This is just a miracle,” right? [laughter] You can’t watch an Ava Hofmann track and think, “Wow, where did this come from?” [laughter]
AVA: No, you can’t.
BEVIBEL: You know exactly who made this and why, right? [laughter]
AVA: Right. What I’m really loving is that we’re getting a lot more of that in Line Rider now. Like, this past month - in October - there were a ton of tracks that were so personal, and you couldn’t forget that a person personally made this. So I’m glad that that’s happening.
This is all just to say... Scribbles!
BEVIBEL: Scribbles! [laughter]
I think something that ties into this really well, actually, is your work outside of Line Rider. You’ve mentioned that you’re a writer, I said earlier that you’re a poet - I believe you’ve described your work, on occasion, as “visual poetry”.
AVA: Mhm.
BEVIBEL: Two examples of this that I really like to think about are A Woman Wandered Into a Thicket, which is this ginormous image that you have to be able to zoom in to even read, and THE WOMAN FACTORY [cw: sexual themes], which you have to type in these CAPTCHAs to read the poem. Your work in Line Rider seems like it’s coming at similar ideas about the medium the art is being created in, but from the opposite angle - where you’re taking this very visual medium, and you’re making poetry with it. [laughter] As you know, words are difficult and therefore uncommon in Line Rider, because it’s very line-heavy, and it’s easy for them to fly by and not be able to read them, and yet it’s omnipresent in all of your work. And that puts you at this very exciting forefront of Line Rider as a literary medium - which, if you had asked me if that was possible in 2018, “Line Rider as a literary medium” would have not made sense to me at all.
In The September Trilogy specifically, words are threaded all throughout in different ways. Sometimes they’re lyrics, sometimes they’re dialogue, sometimes they’re an internal monologue, sometimes they’re poetry, and usually they’re multiple of these things simultaneously layered on top of each other, and very often they’re an important part of how the narrative is moving forward in that moment. So, how are you thinking about Line Rider as a medium for the written word, and how does your poetry work inform this unique approach to Line Rider, in all of your work, and also in The September Trilogy?
AVA: So, yeah - I would consider my “main” medium to be writing - poetry. I feel like, with everything that I do, I’m accidentally converging upon comics as the ideal art form. [laughter] My poetry has introduced a lot of pictures and diagrams and sequential non-linear reading into it - it’s like weird abstract comics - and then Line Rider is this more drawing medium, and I’m adding words and, like, comic sequences, and so, yeah - the way you put it - it feels like they’re both converging to comics.
BEVIBEL: Video comics! The ultimate art form! [laughter]
AVA: You may not like it, but this is what peak artistic performance looks like. [laughter]
So, yeah - I think poetry really was an important starting point for the addition of words in my Line Rider art, because lyrics are so important to me in music. I mean, there’s tons of great music without lyrics, but I’m never really driven to make a Line Rider track to something that has no lyrics. Words are so important to me - language is so important to me - so I really wanted to put the lyrics in my Line Rider tracks, so that already necessitates a nightmare [laughter] as you highlighted. Putting words all throughout a Line Rider track is so difficult, especially when you’re hand-drawing them. It would be impossible without the tablet - it’s so much easier to write a word out on your tablet than it is on a trackpad. And so, again, the actual tools are lowering a certain barrier to entry here, but at the same time, I was thinking about how lyrics themselves could be scenery, even very early on. That’s what BELLS is - this big experiment in typographic scenery, where the words are so scribbled that you can’t read them, first of all, but also, there’s a fidelity to the music - the actual vocals are so fuckin’ blown-out that you can’t understand what the person’s saying, right? And I keep exploring that in You Want It, where I tried to make every single word a disgusting bubble letter that was, like, half-organic, half-murderous.
BEVIBEL: The two genders - organic and murderous. [laughter]
AVA: Wow. Gender ideology owned. [laughter]
But you see that continuing in a lot of ways throughout my work in Line Rider. (Qu)irk/eer is a really good entry into this in terms of The September Trilogy, because (Qu)irk/eer itself is a comic, in a way. It’s all these panels that are labeled, and you get a very, very abstract narrative from it. The flip side to the comics thing is, you can put words into images, but you can also make images words. The September Trilogy has a ton of words in it - that’s very true - dialogue is so key, with things people say, things people say inside themselves, and words that just sort of exist in the environment as lyrics or other things - but also… this is maybe indicative of how broken my brain is, but I feel like the characters - the drawings - where I repeat them, and where I put them, are themselves words, also. In fact, a character has all the same problems that a word does - you can go by too fast and they’re not legible, they’re super difficult to write - to draw. And maybe, we might think there’s no real distinction between those things - writing and drawing - especially in Line Rider. And if you arrange the drawings in the right way, you get a sentence - this happened, this happened, and this happened.
There’s, like, house imagery in all of those tracks - houses with doors in weird places, and windows in weird places - that continues throughout - and that is me taking this image of the house and permutating it through a bunch of poetic transformations, to get at, “What is the role of home in experiences of abuse and healing?” Because the the home is so fraught, conceptually and emotionally. Maybe some people are like, “I have no fraught feelings about the concept of a home,” but for me, at least, and I think for a lot of people who have dealt with abuse from family members, home is a complicated concept. And permutating that was sort of a poetic and narrative and symbolic way of thinking about it. This continual flow between words and images is so important to the way I think, and the way I write or draw, and the hope is that they build each other up, and maybe touch at something true and psychological and heartfelt.
BEVIBEL: I think you’re onto something. I was thinking about how we use the same word, “character”, to refer to a letter and a figure - and you’re talking about stringing together one type of character to create sentences, and a different type of character to create sentences, at the same time. Like, you might arrange letters to make a word, and you might arrange figures to make a comic - and it seems like you’re thinking about them in similar ways.
AVA: The distinction between them is entirely illusory and cultural, actually. If you look at the origin of writing, it’s really just people drawin’ a thing. A classic example is hieroglyphics - a drawing of a bird could mean either literally that word or a phoneme. And we see that also in Nahua writing - it’s actually very cool, because it’s just drawing - it’s just a comic, that there was a way to read to get certain key pieces of information. The distinction that we put between “this is writing” and “this is drawing” is a distinctly modern and European formulation that is bound up in other ideas about who gets access to the production of art and knowledge.
BEVIBEL: Go off! [laughter]
AVA: They really are the same thing, and the fact that we think of them differently is symptomatic, again, of a society that tries to hide art making away from people. Because if you get a little kid, and they’re a little kid that likes to put marks on paper - which they don’t necessarily have to be - but if you get a lot of those, that’s all they’re doing - they’re drawing comics. And so I think both my Line Rider and my writing are getting at that. Maybe this is just a sign I should abandon both and become a comics artist. [laughter] No, I think by troubling those lines, I’m doing the work that I actually want to be doing.
BEVIBEL: One of the things that you mentioned was, when you were talking about the house, how there’s a trauma relationship with the house. And it’s not just the house - it seems like most of what The September Trilogy is about is trauma around various things - parents, music, home, pets. It’s a lot heavier than your average Line Rider release. And this is a thread throughout your work - I Want to Be Well is, similarly, very heavy. You seem to enjoy, or at least be drawn to, exploring these horrific experiences, from the plausibly real - things that are taken from maybe a real life experience, like the parental abuse - to, in Know Thy Self, this supernatural, metaphorical stuff, like the dismemberment of September towards the end. And you’re doing this in an art medium that most people associate with silly slapstick humor and wasting time in the computer lab in middle school. Why?
AVA: I think, on one level, these are just the themes I like exploring - pretty serious emotions, trauma, gender, the potential for beauty in the midst of those things, and healing. So, if I’m making something in Line Rider, that’s just gonna necessarily be a part of my voice, because those are things I’m interested in. And to be like, “Oh, this thing is for children, so you can’t do something for yourself in it,” is very reductive. You can do whatever you want in art, as long as you’re being ethical and responsible. I don’t really give a shit if you’re making scenes of death and gore in macaroni art, or something. [laughter]
BEVIBEL: That sounds great! [laughter]
AVA: Exactly. So I think, on one level, this is who I am and I’m making art authentic to me here, so it’s just authentic to me still, even if it’s intense. On a deeper level, I think the best work that I make in Line Rider is oftentimes about growing up - about being a kid, and then not being a kid anymore. I feel like some of the best things I’ve done in Line Rider are about that distance, using Line Rider as a way to explore that distance. My Boy is about queer youth, but even more than that, it’s about being a queer adult reflecting on queer youth. Similarly, with Three Memories of Snow, again, it’s really about being an adult reflecting on being a child.
BEVIBEL: Three Memories of Snow is a really good example of this - how you’re using Line Rider to explore childhood, and nostalgia, and the distance between childhood and adulthood, because Line Rider is so associated with childhood.
AVA: Right - Line Rider has this really strong association with childhood. That means people are maybe more forgiving when something is more scribbled - there’s the scribbles again - but also, I think there can be a strain of people who don’t think art about childhood, or that has childhood as its subject matter, is for them, now that they’re adults. And I feel like presenting it in that way can short-circuit that in some ways.
Specifically with The September Trilogy, My Pal Foot Foot looks sort of like a Shel Silverstein comic or something, right? It looks like childhood drawings - and then Know Thy Self looks like edgy teen shit doodles, and then on a day like this one looks more like something maybe an adult drew. Even just visually, it’s about growing up, and having Line Rider be the vehicle for a story about growing up is a huge theme in the stuff that I make - this nostalgia and reflectiveness. That means, necessarily, there’s going to be some darkness there. I don’t know, I feel like being a kid is really dark!
BEVIBEL: It certainly can be!
AVA: This is maybe a tried and true trope, but I feel like people infantilize children. And, obviously, you want to avoid making a child a mini-adult. But people just don’t fucking respect the autonomy of children all the fucking time, and it makes me so mad! [laughter] When I was a little child, I was afraid of the universe ending - I was terrified by this concept. I feel like more things should let themselves be about human darkness. More things should just be open to - life has a lot of pain in it, and that’s kind of interesting and humbling. I don’t know. It is kind of silly that I make all this serious stuff in Line Rider.
BEVIBEL: Find the weirdest, most infantilized, most impractical medium, and make the darkest shit you can.
AVA: You know, I work in poetry, so it’s not too much of a leap - both are about as obscure. [laughter]
BEVIBEL: One thing I really love about The September Trilogy is how it is about this darkness, but, because it’s about this darkness, it ends up being about healing. Ultimately, it’s a story of a trans woman surviving abuse, discovering herself, and healing from all these traumatic childhood and young adult experiences. You’ve talked a little bit about that when you were talking about how you ended up making it, but it’s really striking to me how rare that is, especially in Line Rider. I think maybe it’s because you can’t make a piece of art that’s just about healing, you have to have the darkness to heal from. If it’s just about happiness, then it’s sort of about nothing. And so I’m curious about what it was like to make a track about healing in Line Rider, and what drew you to that, and how you managed to pull it off.
AVA: I kind of mentioned this - My Pal Foot Foot ends up being a little bit of a vent track, even though it’s also, I think, separately, an interesting narrative and considered piece of art, but there’s a lot that is… not one-to-one with my own life, but inspired by my experiences with a transphobic family. I think I was only emboldened to actually make a track about trauma, and also healing, because of UTD’s Silhouette, which is one of the first tracks that is really about abuse in an interesting way. And in order to explore abuse, it moves into animation - another key linkage. And UTD tries to do a similar thing in Where a Silhouette Once Walked to explore healing - so I feel like that’s a key inspiration - seeing other people make tracks about abuse. Ethan Li, also - they’re working on a track about their own experiences with family, and the fraughtness of that. Other people were doing the thinking first, in some really important ways, and was like, “Okay, I can take this subject matter and maybe apply my style and what I’ve been thinking about with motion comics to it.” It wasn’t that stately and thought out beforehand - it was like, “Oh, I can do this.” And, again, Ethan Li shows up here, because Ethan Li wrote these really amazing reviews - a review of My Pal Foot Foot, and a review of Amsterdam - where Ethan was thinking about human trauma and emotions in this really considered way, that got me really thinking about healing, right - how do you depict healing? And it made me really want to try it, because of these open-ended questions that were really hard and had no good answer. I wanted not to try to definitively answer them, but to pick away at these questions, right?
Silhouette is again sort of the model here, with that only being possible with multiple tracks. A Silhouette Once Walked basically does the same narrative move as on a day like this one, except I did them in my way. Each one took way longer than I thought it would. After I finished My Pal Foot Foot, I was like, “Yeah, now I’ll just launch into the next one in the series!” and then I didn’t do that. Each of them was, like, several months, and then it all came pouring out in a very short period of time. On a day like this one was the hardest one. I started that track, like, three or four times before I finally did it, trying different things. One time I played around with slow motion, because the track sort of feels slow. I was being overly perfectionistic about it - I wanted the movement to be really beautiful. One night at 5AM I just...
BEVIBEL: At 5AM! [laughter]
AVA: Well, what happened, is I woke up - I had gone to bed really early - it was like a weird situation where I had napped and then slept again, and I woke up at 5AM, like, “Well, I don’t know I’m fucking doing with my life, but I don’t want to go back to sleep.”
BEVIBEL: As one does.
AVA: And there was napping involved - I don’t know, it was weird - I had the energy of taking a nap at, like, 3AM. And I woke up, and I think someone else on the Line Rider Artists Server was also up, for some reason, and in the space of an hour to two hours I made all of the movement for on a day like this one. I was like, “I need to actually extend myself the same kind of empathy and acceptance that I want to extend to the character - that the character needs to figure out for themselves.” And so it was like, “I’m just gonna do the movement, and the movement is the movement - it exists - and I’ll figure it out.” It turned out pretty well - the way the movement operates in that track - but I did not have a plan for it! [laughter] And actually, a lot of that movement was a real pain to work with, because it ended up being very non-linear. Like, at the beginning, there’s a section that goes back and forth a bunch - there’s a bunch of going back and forth in this track - and that meant I had to really get the camerawork right, and get the drawings just so.
BEVIBEL: That’s so funny that you describe it like you fell into it backwards, accidentally, because one of the most striking and beautiful pieces is that there’s this swaying back and forth. My Pal Foot Foot is kind of aggressively linear, and then Know Thy Self is fuckin’ all over the place [laughter] - it’s a mess - and it works well for that. And then there’s this swaying back and forth - we go, and then we pause - there’s, like, an important image there - and then we go, and then we pause - and then we see an important image there. And then, maybe the most important pause - you actually cut to a zoomed-out fixed-camera landscape, and there’s this moment of realization, of, “I have to set a boundary.” It’s like a little micro-moment, where it’s like, “This is how healing works.” You figure out, “Oh, this is what’s wrong, and this is what I need to do to fix it to move forward in the healing process.” It’s so funny that you describe it as almost accidental that this beautiful thing came about.
AVA: I know, and it works great, because the swaying back and forth also means you’re revisiting things, over and over - even though the camera work doesn’t really have a whole lot of revisiting, per se - it’s non-linear in a very soothing way. And it’s interesting you mentioned that mountain scene with the realization as the moment of healing. I think you’re right - that that moment is really great, and important to, like, “What is healing?” but I was so worried about that moment - because no drawing could fit in that movement, because it was too back-and-forth. And then I realized that it looked like mountains, and I was like, “Oh, what if we were looking at the world? I think there was an element of falling backwards into it, but the way I did the movement actually sort of metaphorizes healing in an important way, in the sense that the movement was defined, and I had to learn how to make something beautiful with what I had, which I think is what growing up is, a lot of the time. When you’re an adult, all of a sudden you’re like, “Oh my God! I was a child!” [laughter] “And all these things happened! And I had no sense of their meaning! Because I was a fucking child!” [laughter] “And now I have to figure it out. I have to take the things about me that are already defined, and go forward, and change with them, and change within them.”
It’s a lot like writing poetry! Maybe writing poetry in a form is sort of a metaphor for trauma. Like, doing art within limitations, right? Maybe that’s why it can be so therapeutic and healing - because you actually have to do what you have to do to heal - forgive yourself, understand, and come up with creative solutions.
BEVIBEL: Instead of, “I have to try again, until I get it right, or I get it perfect,” you have to accept what you are, and where you’ve been, and what you have.
AVA: Yeah. And I have no background in anything clinical, so this is me going off the rails, but it’s interesting, because a lot of the ways in which people get closed up about art - they never work on anything, or they are perfectionist about it, like we see in Line Rider - there’s this distinct resemblance to trauma reactions. Not saying art is the end-all be-all therapeutic thing, but I feel like they learn from each other - healing, and the practice of art. And this is to say - how was I able to make something that pulled it off - I would say, an element of luck.
BEVIBEL: Isn’t it always, though?
AVA: Yeah - I mean, that’s all art that is anything. Also, actually extending empathy to oneself - which I think can be really hard if you’re someone dealing with trauma - and also, sitting on something and thinking about it for a long time is always good. But not forever, right - you have to then kick yourself out into the world. And also, the amazing work from so many other people. I think healing is sort of mysterious and spiritual in a lot of ways, and I think art-making is similar. I don’t know, how does anything happen? It’s a beautiful mystery.
BEVIBEL: That’s... poetry! [laughter]
How do you feel about The September Trilogy, now that it’s out in the world? How do you make sense of it, as something that you have made, and that is finished?
AVA: I think it’s the piece of Line Rider art that I’m most happy with. If a witch appeared, and cursed me to never be able to make anything in Line Rider again, I’d be like, “Okay, well, I made the September Trilogy. I’ll be okay.” I feel very lucky that I got to make it. I think art can sometimes feel like you’re possessed, and then you’re like, “What the fuck?” [laughter] And so, when you’re possessed by something that helps make you a better person, all you can do is feel lucky. And I hope it is helpful to others. I hope other people enjoy it and get something out of it, and learn something from it, whether about trauma, about empathy, or just about art. It’s out as three separate tracks, and then also out as a playlist, and then as a single video, so it’s kind of in a weird state, where I think it’s kind of a nightmare for anyone to watch the whole thing, because it’s in three different places - so I don’t know how much access people have to it, which I’m a little bummed by. But I think that’s sort of the nature of doing something kind of weird, format-wise, with a medium, right - releasing it as three different tracks.
BEVIBEL: And I don’t think you could have made it all at once - it would have been impossible.
AVA: Yeah - and I wouldn’t want to sit on the three tracks - because releasing them to a group of people, and getting feedback, and talking about them, was part of being able to make the next one. So there’s a way it was sort of also a durational performance art piece, if you want to be deranged about it.
BEVIBEL: All artmaking is performance art when you do it with other people. [laughter]
AVA: True. But I would say I’m very happy with it. Mostly, I’m like, “What the fuck? I wish I could be more like the people I imagine.” [laughter] It’s a vision of healing - it’s vision of becoming a better person - and it’s like, “Oh my god,” you know? And it’s not linear, right? And so, I look at it, and I’m like, “Okay. Let’s be slightly more linear, in terms of healing.” Not forcing myself to be a certain way, but like, “Oh, I’ve modeled for myself a way of thinking about healing, and that is very nice. I hope it’s helpful.”
BEVIBEL: I think that’s very common in art generally - making art as a way of processing where you are at, and where you want to be, and where you want to go, and how you want to get there. It’s like, once you can chart it, then you can maybe try to do it.
AVA: Yeah, I think that’s true. I guess it’s not as common in terms of something that I do. I think, partially because it is about healing, it’s maybe the piece of art that I’ve made that feels the most like I can still learn something from it, or it has the most to teach me.
BEVIBEL: Line Rider.
AVA: Line Rider? I hardly know ’er! [laughter]
BEVIBEL: You had to get one of those in. [laughter]
AVA: I did. I’m sorry.
BEVIBEL: It’s perfect. It wouldn’t have been right if there wasn’t at least one “I hardly know ’er”. [laughter] So, you probably know what this question is.
AVA: What? Oh no...
BEVIBEL: What do you hope for from the future, both in terms of Line Rider, and in terms of your life, and the world?
AVA: I don’t fuckin’ know! Why do you think I ask everyone else this question in the podcast? [laughter] Because I want to know what other people have to say. Fuck! Okay, I know what I hope for from Line Rider.
BEVIBEL: Let’s start there!
AVA: I hope people keep making more wild, personal, experimental stuff. I feel like we’ve seen a real big uptick in it this year that is leaving me really hopeful for the future. Gavin’s been making some incredible stuff, with at the door..., Instantflare / Ray has been making some really great personal stuff this year as well, and then there’s fuckin’ Mount Eerie… I feel like, even if it has not been the best year for Line Rider as a commercial product, it has been one of the best years ever for Line Rider as an art form.
BEVIBEL: Absolutely.
AVA: So, I hope it just... keeps doing that, right? [laughter] I hope people keep making things, and keep making new and interesting and challenging things. I hope a lot of new people find Line Rider - that’s the one thing that gets me worried about it. The people who are in the community are growing a lot, but most of the people have been in the community for a while at this point. I don’t know how many new people are making exciting things.
BEVIBEL: I’m a lot more optimistic than I was, say, a year ago, because I feel like when people are growing in an art medium, as a community, even if there’s not people always coming in, the influxes tend to happen in waves, and as long as we’re learning and growing and changing, it means that, when the next wave comes, we’re ready.
AVA: Right - and I don’t have that perspective, so that’s really helpful to hear. I came in in 2021 which was at the tail end of one of those waves, so my experience of new people coming into Line Rider is that it’s just been steadily going down, and I’m projecting. I’m like a climate scientist who only has three months of data. [laughter]
BEVIBEL: Politics! [laughter]
AVA: It was politics from the moment I said “labor”. [laughter]
BEVIBEL: It was, wasn’t it.
AVA: But I hope people just keep exploring their voices further and further. Another thing I hope for Line Rider is - as people are getting more experimental and pushing the boundaries, there’s a space for more and better tools for Line Rider. This is something I want to emphasize. I think one of the worst sayings ever is, “The bad craftsman blames his tools.” I hate that saying, because our tools define entirely the boundaries upon which we can make something. So that’s one thing I hope for - more expansive tools for Line Rider. And other people trying out wild and new kinds of ways of making tracks - video editing is one kind of tool, a drawing tablet is another kind of tool. [laughter] And there’s this really exciting thing with people moving back and forth between Line Rider Advanced and Linerider.com, and it’s indicative of people using their tools expansively, in terms of making tracks that need both. So, maybe a way to unify those would be great. [laughter]
BEVIBEL: Yeah, make it so we can use all of the tools at the same time! [laughter]
AVA: It would be very nice. So, okay, I’ll start… no, I’m gonna end with myself. We’ll talk about the world. I hope the world...
Bevibel: You really don’t want to talk about yourself. [laughter]
AVA: What do I want for myself? This is one of the hardest questions to ever exist.
BEVIBEL: Well, you’ve already talked about it a little bit, right - you talked about on a day like this one, and how it was kind of a process of charting... maybe not a path, but a direction that you want to move in.
AVA: Yeah. I do want to heal. That is something I want for myself. I want to be kinder to myself. I want to make more art. I want to write 50 books before I die. It’s this weird insane goal I have. [laughter] I want to not assume that people hate me for no reason. And I want to always be able to extend useful and helpful amounts of empathy to myself and the world. There can be unhelpful amounts, but I want to extend kindness. I want to err on the side of too much empathy rather than too little.
And then for the world, I hope it BURNS and DIES! [laughter]
BEVIBEL: We could just end it there if you want.
AVA: No, no, no… let me rephrase. I want every billionaire on Earth to burn and die. [laughter] And for all the trans people to live in gay fucking harmony. Actually, yeah - that’s what I want from the future. I want a future where trans people have at least a modicum more liberation than they do now. That’s the future I want to live in. Trans Liberation now. Trans rights. Fuck you.
BEVIBEL: Me? [laughter]
AVA: No, no, no - the listener.
BEVIBEL: Whoever they are! [laughter]
AVA: Fuck you specifically, especially if you’re cis! [laughter] What’s wrong with you? Go out there and get some cross-sex hormones, and stop being cis! [laughter]
BEVIBEL: That’s what September’s doing - that’s part four - she’s gonna make all the cis people trans. [laughter]
AVA: Yeah, that’s the goal!
BEVIBEL: Force-transition. [laughter]
AVA: It’s the trans agenda. That’s the real reason why I’m making art in Line Rider - to brainwash the youth with my gender ideology. [laughter]
BEVIBEL: Incredible.
AVA: I’ve already done it! I’ve already transed at least four kids in the Line Rider community! This is so stupid... [laughter]
BEVIBEL: It turns out that if you just live as your authentic self - and you exist around people, they all become trans! I don’t know how that works.
AVA: It’s because transgenders are more authentic than cisgenders.
This interview was conducted on November 2, 2022. It has been edited for concision and clarity.
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