Mario's Furniture 2, an installation and interactive game, will be exhibited at TELIC Arts Exchange in Chinatown from October 28th to December 3rd. Created by artists Hillary Mushkin and S.E. Barnet, Mario's Furniture integrates wireless technology with artistic production and performance. In most video games you just sit on the couch, but when you play Mario’s Furniture you MOVE the couch, in fact you move the whole living room!
Mario's Furniture began in 2002 as a video installation, including a single night of performance. Four years later, Mario’s Furniture 2 - created with programmer Clay Chaplin and electronic specialist Lorin Parker - is now a wireless environment where 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.
In Mario’s Furniture 2 the body is actualized in real and virtual space simultaneously. Players can’t merely manipulate an avatar with a joystick. Playing Mario’s Furniture involves strenuous physicality, parodying conventional video games in which avatars are put in peril while players sit on a couch. Players must physically move the couch to play the
game. Mario’s emphasizes how camera and screen effect the construction of social relationships. Players see themselves (and not a stand in) under the camera’s scrutiny, humorously mirroring the absurdity of living within the frame.Mushkin and Barnet look at technological and narrative ways in which video and digital media unfold and complicate meaning. The game critically remarks on aesthetics and narrative boy-logic of computer games while reflecting on theories of the digitally decentered subject. The artists’ racing antics against the camera alludes to Chaplin and Keaton, Mario Brothers, Tomb Raider and the deadline pressed “Extreme Makeover: Home Edition.”