Although I have spent three and a half years at UCI, today was my first visit to the Beall Center for Art and Technology. I am very glad that we saw the Grand Text Auto exhibit as a class because I probably would not have gone on my own, even though I wanted to.

[giantJoystick] reminded me of the Wii game system because both require physical movement from the players instead of just thumb motion on a hand-held controller. While I did not try it, I think that [giantJoystick] would be a lot of fun to play because it is essentially playing two games at once: the Atari game on the screen, but a second game where the two players must work together in order to beat the Atari game. Not only is the player playing the game in relationship to the screen action, but must coordinate with the other player in order to efficiently beat the game.

An installation I did participate in was called “Screen”. “Screen” required that I don glasses to see the words on the screen in 3-D and wear a glove in order to “hit” the words that were coming towards me. The text on the screen was already in a particular order to tell a story, but when the words came towards me and I hit them, they moved into different places among the blanks in the text so that I essentially created an entirely new piece of literature. As the “Screen” installation came to a close, all the rest of the words on the screen came towards me, flying in all directions, swirled together in a sort of vortex, and dissolved.

The installation titled “Implementation” involved stories printed onto stickers and then placed in the actual world. When I saw the photos of these stickers placed in public spaces, I was reminded of last week’s New University article titled “Campus Graffiti Vandals Arrested” because these two works are both in the public sphere, yet one is considered art and the other vandalism.

I had the opportunity to watch “Facade” both on the computer simulation and through the augmented reality adaptation. It was amusing to see that with every decision made by the player, whether to sit on the couch or simply what to drink, one simulated character would feel encouragement while the other would feel abandonment. The simulated woman insisted that there were certain rules of etiquette to follow while their “guest” was present, such as having telephone calls go through the answering machine, yet she allowed herself to confront and argue with her husband in the presence of the “guest”.