Mario’s Furniture: A Wireless Interactive Video Installation and Game

In most video games you just sit on the couch, but when you play Mario’s Furniture you MOVE the couch, in fact you rearrange the whole living room!

Mario's Furniture is an interactive video installation integrating computer vision and wireless technology with artistic production and performance. In this project we created a wireless environment in which viewers become players, able to play the game in the physical world while seeing themselves and their scores projected on screen in real time. Players’ actions simultaneously take place in the real space of the exhibit and the virtual space of the video projection.

M.A. Greenstein neatly describes Mario’s Furniture in her essay “Virtual Retrofit (or What Makes Computer Gaming so Damn Racey?)”. In Mario’s Furniture, human players “shove and schlep as fast as they can, a sofa, two chairs, a coffee table, and freestanding lamps in an effort to form a ‘sitting down, conversational arrangement,’ in keeping with one other primary condition, namely the players must stay within the perspectival frame of a relentlessly panning camera…. Points are assigned to the player whose movements stay within the eye of the ever-changing camera angle. Each piece of furniture tallies to particular points, e.g. the couch is worth 100 points, while the entire conversational arrangement racks up a whopping 500 [1].” (See Figs 1 and 2.) Game scores are tallied, winners determined and high scorers may leave their initials as a challenge to the next player.

For the first time in a video game context, we actualized the body in real and virtual space simultaneously, while emphasizing how camera and screen affect the construction of social relationships. In Mario’s Furniture, we don’t allow players to merely manipulate an avatar with a joystick; they must physically move the couch to play this game. This strenuous physical effort to create living room settings for socializing parodies conventional video games in which maverick avatars are put in peril while players sit on a couch. Players’ efforts to make picture-perfect settings in real time are almost slapstick, humorously mirroring the absurdity of living within the frame of an image-happy culture.

Fig. 1.

“Mario’s Furniture 2: A Mushkin-Barnet Game,” wireless interactive video game installation, dimensions variable, 2006. A player scores 100 points for sitting on a chair while on screen during the camera’s ceaseless rotation. (© Hillary Mushkin and S.E. Barnet. Photo © Sean Dockray and Fiona Whitton.)

In Mario’s Furniture, we critically remark on aesthetics and narrative boy-logic of computer games while reflecting on theories of the digitally decentered subject, such as those of Allucquere Rosanne Stone. As Donna Haraway assigns the female to the technological, we adopt the machine gaze for non-normative purposes—in service of a non-heroic domestic activity. Our racing antics against the camera allude to Charlie Chaplin and Buster Keaton, Mario Brothers, Tomb Raider and the deadline-pressed Extreme Makeover: Home Edition. We presume a politics of representation and pictorial illusion, and we make a silly yet deadpan response to 1990s video and digital art–cinematic self-consciousness (for example, the work of Bill Viola,) weighty feminist gesturing (e.g. Shirin Neshat) and insular avatar-based interactive work.

Fig. 2.

“Mario’s Furniture 2: A Mushkin-Barnet Game”, wireless interactive video game installation, dimensions variable, 2006. Players find creative ways to move the furniture into the camera’s view and sit to increase their score. In this case, a whole family chips in to help “player 1.” (© Hillary Mushkin and S.E. Barnet. Photo © Sean Dockray and Fiona Whitton.)

Practical Description

Mario’s Furniture takes an approximately 1000 sq. ft. area to play. A mini-DV camera pans the gaming area on a motorized pan-head tripod. The live feed from the camera is projected so players can see how they and the furniture are currently positioned within the frame. Players continually move the furniture across the gaming area to keep it within the frame...