High score: Marina Abramovich, the video game

Good fun this morning comes from ArtInfo, where I learned that Danish Denmark-based game designer and scholar Pippin Barr has created a low-fi, early-Nintendo-esque version of Marina Abramovich's movingly spare performance "The Artist Is Present," which Abramovich created for MoMA last year as part of an important retrospective of her career. 

Not surprisingly, the game's main feature is waiting, as many hundreds of New Yorkers did to sit across the table from a mute Abramovich for the duration of their choosing. Gamers shouldn't be surprised that the game takes upwards of 5 mostly action-free hours to complete -- or that communing with a tiny, pixellated Abramovic avatar doesn't offer quite the same emotional satisfaction, which is surely part of Barr's point in choosing such a necessarily physical experience to transcribe to his low-fi virtuality. (As Barr himself points out on this very blog, there is a more-defined portion of the game where a less-pixellated-but-still-dot-matrixy Abramovich appears on screen face-on). 

Nonetheless, conceptually, Barr's game seems to underscore the absolute truth that the real experience of presence and humanity can't be virtually recreated, regardless of technology. Still, funny, isn't it?

Comments

[Pippin]

Hey there, Pippin Barr here - I made the game. Just wanted to say that if you wait it out and sit with Marina you do get to look into her eyes, rather than the side on view... just so you know! Thanks for the write-up!

[Murray Whyte]

Thanks Pippin -- you've saved me the trouble of tracking you down! Woudl love to chat -- let me know where I can reach you. Cheers, MW