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OVERVIEW Stunt Dummies, is an interactive multimedia game installation
which presents ideas about engagement, embodiment and the power to activate.
This artwork explicitly uses videogame interfaces, iconography and
conventions to explore the promise of technology as well as its frightening,
fascinating and humorous contradictions. It is the exact nature of this
complex message which lends itself to conveyance via the remixing and
reworking of contemporary game experiences which are integrated in an
original, navigable series of interrelated 3D virtual environments. Stunt Dummies is
concerned with the duality of the promises of technology, while also
illustrating aspects of control and manipulation. Stunt Dummies poses
the question, are we controlling technology or is technology controlling us?
Do we humans ask too much from our technology? Or does our technology ask too
much from us? Stunt Dummies proposes what Neil Postman refers to as
the phenomenon that surrounding every technology are institutions promoting
world views which try to alter our sense of what is important in a culture:
the natural order of things, our social relationships, what is reasonable,
necessary, inevitable, and ultimately what is real.[1]
Stunt Dummies is an
adventure game which presents a proposal that is at once intriguing
disturbing, and comical. Ultimately do we ourselves become the stunt dummies,
stunted by our use of technology? Or can we become more aware of how we are
being changed ideologically, physiologically, socially and culturally? Stunt Dummies asks how can
individual cultures maintain their identity in the digital era, and how can
they continue to share the diverse richness they have to offer? |
[1] Postman, Neil. Technopoly: the Surrender of Culture to Technology (New York: Vintage Books, 1993), p. 12.