Description
In a darkened space,
a robotic projector throws a stream of hovering, undulating
background clips on the walls, floor, and ceiling. The
background video and the projector’s movements are pre-scripted to complement
the content of the video clips (X/Y/Z directions, speed,
duration). The three icons, freed from their “home” environments
(and their original media), are available for insertion.
Charlie, Coyote and Mario represent
three figures from the history of media in the endless
attempt to evade the “beam” of
militarized vision within which we inevitably continue to
appear. They are icons of different periods in the evolution
of mass media (cinema, television, and computer games) and
modes of representation (the traditional “live” shoot,
line animation, and digital generation). Like figures from
classical drama, these modern media icons have dramatic personae
that are familiar to us, and with whom we can identify. They
all struggle against the material world, and yet in their
survival, find some residue of grace.
These iconic figures, playing in the
foreground, are digitally inserted into equally recognizable
scenes – battlefields,
domestic environments, mythic worlds – taken from a
database of American pop culture: movies, animations, comic
books, TV shows, TV news, and computer games, creating fast-paced
backgrounds consisting of explosions, superheroes, killers,
journalists, and movie stars.
In BE[AM] we see this database of American pop culture through
these three characters who are the opposite of what we are
led to believe is the strong male, the warriors and killers,
violent and destructive. These three icons are struggling
like us, with the world, and the idea that at any moment
we can get into trouble, but we have to just go through it.
These guys are always in trouble, but they always come back,
they find ways, and they start from scratch again and again.
BE[AM] looks at these images, and lets the public enter them
in a game that, also, is not typical; rather than trying
to win or achieve a goal. There is nothing to win.
Three game stations are highlighted intermittently for
the public’s attention, inviting any volunteering
visitor to take control over one of the icons. Each station
is dedicated to a specific icon. Each console is equipped
with a gamepad.
Sporadically the installation takes
control of a character. The machine is a player as well,
with it’s own control.
There are points in time when characters are already composited
in the background video. Control of a character will be taken
away from a guest player in order to fulfill these scripted
actions. The consoles light up when their character becomes
available for play.
Players use the gamepads to invoke particular behaviors
in their onscreen surrogate. Through the gamepads inputs,
players can chose among behaviors (pre-recorded clips) and
control size and position. The background clips have different
durations, they can be very short (a few seconds). The player
has constantly to quickly adjust to new choices. There are
no predictable actions.
Occasionally, no background is displayed
by the machine, and all three stations are highlighted
for a short game allowing interaction among the three icons,
alone in space. The characters’ interaction
is left to the players’ imagination.
Technical information
The video is made up of three layers which are composited
in real time. The first layer is called the base movie; it
is made up of clips of news broadcasts and other media. This
base movie is a specified length and plays through from beginning
to end. The second layer is used to mask parts of the video:
for vignetting the clips and otherwise isolating parts of
the 4:3 video frame. The top layer is the province of the
three icons which appear to move in and around the video
frame.
The audio of the background clips is replaced by an original
sound design made from effects such as explosions, gun shots,
car crashes, cartoon sounds, military orders, news reports.
Additionally each character is accompanied by his own uniquely
scored leitmotiv.
Technically, the work employs a robotic video projector
(DL1 from High End Systems), a Mac Pro with MAX/MSP/Jitter
software, USB to MIDI to DMX interfaces, a Mac mini computer
for the audio component, 3 game stations with gamepads. Compositing
of the mask and character layers is handled by custom video
software written in Max/Jitter. The movement of the robotic
projector is controlled by a separate Max/MSP patch sending
control signals directly to the control yoke.
Concept
The merging of the technologies of
vision and the technologies of destruction has been going
on since the invention of the camera, but has become critical
after 9/11. In Hollywood movies, video games, sports, and
in news programs, entertainment and combat are indistinguishable.
In the words of Tim Lenoir, the military-industrial complex
has become the “military-entertainment
complex.” The consequence of this shift is sophisticated,
and covert: it is the prevailing ideological manipulation.
The video war games trend and business in relation to real
war, power struggle, and fascination with celebrity and visibility,
tend to confuse fame and marketing self-promotion with art
and self-expression. The project addresses a shift from surveillance
control to mass entertainment manipulation; from increased
transparency to fake visibility to the triumph of the gaming
rules, whether the game is in TV news, a movie, the stock
market, or a real battlefield.
Our proposition is that the ‘security’ discourse
of the emerging ‘military entertainment complex’ collapses
the ambiguities of the relation to the image of the other
into a clearer but more rigid relation, which quickly hardens
into paranoid ensembles of us versus them. BE[AM] tries to
recreate a critical distance between image and sound, sender
and receiver, market and consumer, targeter and target, and
thus to explore how large scale, long-term cultural forces
impact individuals in their everyday lives. |
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