Mario’s Furniture 2 is an installation and interactive game created by Hillary Mushkin and S.E. Barnet. Instead of sitting on the couch, players have to move the couch, and the whole living room too!
In this wireless environment, viewers become players, physically moving objects of conflicting human and miniature scales, while racing against the camera’s ceaseless panning. The opponents’ goal is to maintain the illusion of perspective and the integrity of the mise-en-scene within the gaming space. Time and space become mutable in correlation to virtual gaming apparatuses.
The body of the player is actualized in real and virtual space simultaneously. Playing Mario’s Furniture involves strenuous physicality, parodying conventional video games in which avatars are put in peril while players sit on a couch. 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.
See it at TELIC, Los Angeles, until December 2, 2006.
Related: the Nintendo Amusement Park aims to build a life-sized game of Super Mario Brothers that you jump through in real space; xBlocks is a mixed-reality video game that you can play on a sculpture and Shigureden: the Nintendo-powered Museum.