BODY HACK

Game Description

Body Hack is a full-body interactive system exploring subversive ideas towards what I call “human shadow responsive interactive art.” These immersive systems can be applied across a huge range of cultural practices including live action cinematic role-hacking games, motion vj-ing, and even full body karaoke.

To introduce the full-body interactive system in gaming, I suggest an experimental game genre - cinematic role-hacking body live action karaoke game, which allows players to hack iconic cinematic or televisual figures with their own body and their on-screen double. The system serves and exaggerates the desire of being someone famous in a cinematic environment. For instance, dancing like Michael Jackson or Madonna, performing Bruce Lee’s Nunchaku move, slum dunking like Michael Jordon, walking like John Wayne, staring on stage like Rolling Stone, being Rose to kiss Jack, making funny gesture like Charlie Chaplin or Mr. Bean, so forth. This is an amusing game not only about role-playing, but also being/hacking/staring. Players, for instance, impress bystander by excellently/awkwardly performing MJ moonwalk.

To hack, the player has to sweat up for intensive body interaction with high degree of constraints that equivalent to following the lyrics come out from karaoke, but continuous body shapes instead. A player sees a movie clip, which then pauses at the moment an iconic action or sequence involving the body of the performer is about to start. Then user consciously and continuously attempts to imitate the movie character’s movement in order to “play” the movie: for example, in a martial arts film, the performer Bruce Lee punches, and the user matches his punch for punch. Failure to simulate the actions exactly will pause the movie again. With such simple interactive form, it physically and psychologically challenges player’s perception. It encourages player to think about the body and its relationship with the media. It lets the player to learn and then perform an iconic action down to tiny little bit of instant. The unique enjoyment and amusement that provided by Body Hack would have never been experienced before.

Artistic Statement

The game explores human perception and body experience by situating participants in a setting of constrained involuntary embodied motion. The system requires users to limit their freedom of movement to the degree of “body keyframing.” In this, Body Hack becomes a reverse motion capture system. The experience of Body Hack foregrounds the sub-conscious awareness of the user's body. Audiences surrender high degrees of control; but surrendering control allows them to enjoy play spaces in previously unengagable cinematic environments. Engaging with this content encourage them to contemplate their own relationships with popular culture and media. Audiences skirt around mass media differences between star and self, between spectacle and action by replacing the cinematic or televisual body persona with an on screen double modeled on the user. Not to mention, all these critical issues of mediation and body manipulation are channeled through a joyful and amusing setting.