Project Description

Between 2008 and 2010, Jack Stenner and I installed Game-Space three times: once at the University of Florida, once at the Tampa Museum of Art, and once at the Samuel P. Museum of Art. Through the development of site-specific surveillance systems, gallery analytics engines, and real-time simulations, Game-Space transforms traditional galleries into ubiquitous media environments for experiments with art and surveillance. In this sense, Game-Space both mirrors the architecture of the art institution as a technology for manufacturing desire, capturing attention, and disciplining bodies.

Within Game-Space a network of security cameras captures live video of the gallery. Computer vision applications employ motion capture and facial recognition algorithms to analyze the video and produce data correlating to the position of individual audience members. These data points used to propel a virtual avatar along a path within a photorealistic visualization of the gallery. Displayed on monitors or projectors and accessible via mobile devices, the recursive feedback from Game-Space offers viewers an uncanny mediation of the ways in which our bodies are surveyed, analyzed, and remediated within institutions of power.

Beyond capturing, analyzing, and visualizing the movements of gallery goers and reenacting the disciplinary power of art institutions, Game-Space also serves as a platform for making “smart art"—art that can respond and disrupt the surveillance of human and nonhuman viewers alike. A gallery-within-a-gallery, Game-Space offers artists a site for the curation and creation of artwork sensitive to the embedded technologies and surveillance systems that already exist within art spaces. Thus, Game-Space functions not as representation, but as a laboratory for experimentation with the art of surveillance and the surveillance of art.

Made with Jack Stenner and exhibited at the University of Florida, the Tampa Museum of Art, and the Samuel P. Harn Museum of Art in 2008–2010.

Project Pages

Exhibition Schedule

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.

At the Samuel P. Harn Museum of Art (GS003)

in Gainesville, FL from October 6, 2009 - January 3, 2010

At the Tampa Museum of Art (GS002)

in Tampa, FL from April 18 - July 11, 2009

At the University Gallery (GS001)

in Gainesville, FL from September 1 - 26, 2008