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Project Description

Game-Space is an ongoing collaborative work with Jack Stenner in which we mirror the power of the art institution by creating ubiquitous media spaces in galleries and museums using security cameras, motion tracking applications, and facial recognition software to track individual audience members. The data collected from visitors is used to drive a video game simulation of the gallery space which highlights the performative aspects of viewership and illustrates some of the ways in which our bodies are disciplined within institutions of power. Though this environment for viewing and making art seems fundementally repressive in the way it controls and monitors participation, opportunities open up for creating work which experiments and plays with these constructs.

Game-Space is a simulation of a simulation, an affective portal exploring the perception of perception. It functions, not as representation, but as a laboratory for experimentation with a hybrid subject. Game-Space is a machine for exploring subjectivity.

Visit the website at http://game-space.org.

Project Pages

Exhibition Schedule

45th Annual Art Faculty Exhibition, Harn Museum of Art, Gainesville FL (October 6, 2009 - January 3, 2010)
Bit, Byte, Dot, Spot: Post-digital Art, Tampa Museum of Art, Tampa FL (April 18 - July 11, 2009)
44th Annual Art Faculty Exhibition, University Gallery, Gainesville FL (September 1 - 26, 2008)

Technical Description

A surveillance system selects a viewer and tracks their position as they experience the work. These coordinates are fed through a network into a videogame engine that models the real world space. This simulation is used to construct dual projections in the local installation space, as well as dual images synchronously presented at this website. The Game-Space apparatus constructs a "hybrid subject" that mediates between local and remote.

A video camera (or cameras, depending on the site) is installed in the ceiling of the target space. this camera feeds a signal to one of two computers running the installation. The video processing computer analyzes the scene from above and extracts x,y coordinates for the viewers in the space. Based on various criteria, the software selects one viewer to track and communicates the location to the second computer which runs a videogame simulation of the environment. The real persons location is mirrored by the location of the in-game avatar as he/she moves from work to work.