Project Research
The two projects that I am referencing are Matt Romein’s Meat Puppet Arcade and William Forsythe’s Nowhere and Everywhere at the Same Time.
In Romein’s Meat Puppet Arcade, the viewer interacts with a video game interface. The website shows Romein using a wireless controller inside a baseball bat to strike his 3D modeled self. More videos show his figurine being shot out of cannons and flung around using various methods.
Credit: Matt Romein
I am immediately struck by the uncanny appearance of his 3D figure. The scan of his own naked body resembles a figurine from a 2010s-era character, but it is off-putting knowing that it is modeled exactly after his real body.
Meat Puppet Arcade encourages the user to “beat up” the artist’s digital twin. The artist notes that the video game should encourage the viewer to consider how humans treat their own and others’ digital “bodies”.
The second project I chose, Nowhere and Everywhere at the Same Time, also explores themes of the treatment of our bodies, though the objective of Forsythe’s project is to explicitly avoid damaging one’s body. Viewers are encouraged to walk through a room full of chaotically swinging pendulums without touching any of them.
The pendulums hang from the ceiling and swing on motors. They are designed to not collide with each other. This results in viewers exercising caution as they dart through or carefully side-step the pendulums.
In both of these projects, themes of spatial awareness and the treatment of human bodies inspire participants to make decisions about how they interact with themselves and others in perilous situations. These concepts are very interesting to me, and I hope to explore them in my own work.
