MARIO'S FURNITURE

Mario’s Furniture, collaboration with Hillary Mushkin, 2002 – 2006 documentation stills from interactive installation and game

This is an interactive installation and performance that takes the experience of dislocation to an immersive environment where viewers become participants in a virtual video game made manifest in a physical place. Integrating wireless technology with artistic production and performance, viewers become players, physically moving objects before a relentlessly panning camera, all the while watching themselves and their scores in real time on a large-screen projection. We used wireless technology to create a game based on aesthetically pleasing and conversation encouraging, furniture arrangement. The work suggests a kind of mirror situation, as participants attempt to negotiate their right from their left by navigating their reality as it’s shown on the screen – an image of themselves caught by the camera’s lense and therefore reversed. Mario’s creates an experience of extreme displacement and unfamiliarity leaving players questioning their basic sensory assumptions.

The project is also the subject of an essay by M.A. Greenstein in Grethe Mitchell and Andy Kinet's book Videogames and Art (published by Intellect books in the U.K. and Chicago Press in the U.S.)

This work was included in Leonardo, MIT Vol. 41, No. 3 (June 2008).