Me Mario - LaVerne Krause Gallery - Winter 2011

In ME MARIO, I take a closer look at the mechanics of video games and explore what exactly in them keeps players engaged. Using cardboard, I recreated the environment of Mario and populated it with interactive prototypes. One example of this is the CoinBox (Fig. 5), which played a sound effect from the game itself when anyone hit the box from below. This allows the player to mimic the actions of Mario and enjoy the same reaction the video game would produce. This action is repetitive in the game and in the gallery, yet in both instances players find enjoyment from a simple sound effect and the idea of a reward. In doing this, I playfully address video games and our relationships with them. How do we interact with a game? Why do we find the reward systems in video games so enticing? Can these systems be viably translated into the real world?

Motion Studies - Washburn Gallery - Fall 2010

In Motion Studies, I explored how a person addicted to virtual space would respond to an overload of his addiction. This overload was created by forcing myself to indulge in my own addictive behaviors on the computer for an entire week straight, for over 14 hours each day. This produced a study in both my physical degradation as I completely immersed myself within virtual space, and also paralleled that condition to the virtual life that I was creating. These comparisons were made physical by presenting the surveillance video collected over the week on three monitors which were divided into 9 smaller video screens. On these 27 mini screens I presented the week in total, focusing on points of interest within the three monitors. In moments such as shown in fig. 3, I compare my head-shot as I play to the headshots I make in the game.