Marco
Brambilla, the Milan-born feature film director known for Hollywood titles such as Demolition Man and Excess Baggage, brought a stunning film exhibition focused on the fuzzy line between real life and virtual reality to the Zenith Media Lounge at the New Museum of Contemporary Art in Soho. Brambilla uses the popular PC video game Counter-Strike as the platform in this symbolic and thought-provoking work. |
Marco Brambilla, still from Halflife, 2002, three channel video projection (DVD), edition of 5
|
First, to
understand what Brambilla is attempting to accomplish, the viewer must
understand Counter-Strike and the stark realities that surround virtual gaming
products. Video gaming companies are focused directly on a minute demographic
of loyal buyers and players who spend hours a day honing their skills at a
certain game. Some may call this obsession, but gaming software companies call
it loyalty. Counter-Strike itself offers the gamer a choice between playing for
a team of counter-terrorists or playing for the terrorists themselves. Halflife
style=’font-size:8.0pt;font-family:Verdana’>, a modified version of
Counter-Strike which Brambilla borrows for his exhibit, allows gamers to play
against one another in a shoot-off. Brambilla captures gamers’ faces as they
are absorbed in the game to give the viewer an idea of the immersion the gamer
has into a world of simulation.
The
reality that Brambilla focuses on in this project is the desire of our society
to view "real life" through a variety of popular media. The artist is
showing our cultural fascination with spectacle over the sometimes boring view
of our actual world. We desire entertainment on a constant basis and Halflife
style=’font-size:8.0pt;font-family:Verdana’> shows all too vividly that we as a
society would rather envision ourselves saving the world as a sort of superhero
than actually getting out and making a difference one step at a time.
Garden
Grove, Orange County, a town that boasts the highest concentration of
cyber-cafes in the United States, is the physical and psychological setting of
the exhibition. Brambilla uses the aforementioned "face shots" of the
immersed gamer while splicing in security camera-like shots of an entire room
of gamers in what could be any cyber-cafe. The security camera shots evoke the
new, increased security measures that cyber-cafes have taken to curb recent
violent events surrounding gamers on opposite Counter-Strike teams. The main
theme of the security camera shots is to illuminate our sense of alienation
within public, shared spaces and once again investigate our cultural
fascination with spectacle. Even though there are as many as 50 people together
in the same room, there is no speaking or human contact between them. Brambilla
shows how our fascination with simulations undermine our need for physical
interaction.
Halflife
style=’font-size:8.0pt;font-family:Verdana’> is comprised of three separate
film components: the various rooms and inside shots of gamers playing
Counter-Strike in a cyber-caf� in Garden City, surveillance-style video footage
of the faces of the competitors, these shots being projected in large format in
the gallery and Game Engine, which is a video of imagery taken from the actual
Counter-Strike game. Game Engine consists of the imagery taken from the
computer screen and spliced into six segments, each depicting the action of a
different game environment. These different game environment areas are called
"maps". They give the viewer an accurate feel of the game’s terrain.
Also included is the average lifespan of a gamer while fighting. All of these
components are carefully edited so that the footage of each gamer’s face
corresponds accurately to the game imagery. Using all of these tools together
gives Brambilla the ability to display a suspenseful yet tranquil dance between
action and reaction.
This
"reality TV" style recreation incites discussion about an incident in
which one Counter-Strike player stabbed another from an opposing team outside one of Garden
Grove’s cyber-caf�s. Brambilla presents this tragedy as an endless loop, giving
the viewer constant repetition of particular imagery as is often the case in
our mass media outlets. As with many of his earlier projects, Brambilla uses
very particular video techniques and editing choices to poignantly illuminate
the alienation of our society in public places. Halflife
style=’font-size:8.0pt;font-family:Verdana’> shows that mediated experience is
held up as better than real life to such an extent that it has already become
impossible to distinguish the difference. Brambilla’s project begs the
question: are video games simulating the real world, the events and the
existence we pass off as reality or has reality started to mimic games
sometimes deemed to be violent or sexual for one’s own pleasure? |
