Michael Jackson 4 Ways is one of a series of video art works which are designed to activate an immersive space from which to critically and creatively consider how reality and simulated environments both construct and reconfigure our ideas about the nature of subjectivity and identity. The video work explores these new phenomenons through Sims 3, which is a strategic life simulation video game where players construct and control their Sims in various social activities and form relationships in a manner similar to real life. Sims 3 does not have a defined final goal and its gameplay is open-ended. Michael Jackson was a person who cut across international racial and gender divisions with his music and lyrics, but whose personal life created intense contradictions between his private life and his role as a musician. As the copies of the Michael Jackson Sims play out their animated roles in Paris Hilton's house, the accompanying audio tracks expose the political and moral debates surrounding accusations of paedophilia. Michael Jackson 4 Ways questions the slippery position the viewer inhabits, to make informed, truth based decisions over these personal and moral online statements. Where does one locate one's moral and ethical decisions based on the artists aesthetics?
Metropolis I,II & III uses the game SimCity Societies to construct three imaginary and psychological zones in order to create a meditative space for reflection, seduction and poetic, apocalyptic reverie. Abstraction, repetition, the grid, and architecture all play their part throughout the world in "real" cities town planning strategies in order to produce territory and the modern civilization. The recent Chilean and Haitian earthquake, South-Pacific islands devastated by tsunamis, apocalyptic meteorites and the dire predictions associated with climate change, overshadow the construction of these three different, yet strangely familiar virtual sites that all strive to undermine both the logic of the game and our own safe, hygienically controlled lifestyles. In Metropolis I,II & III, dystopian, authoritarian and sublime, gated architectural estates merge and dissolve into one another conjuring up disturbing comparisons between our real, lived experience and our day-to-day mediated trauma, represented elsewhere in our fantasies or across the electric spectacle of the global, media screen.
In the scenic, Walt Disney inspired Homesteads, the family unit and children's innocence come under attack from advancements in new technology to create a disturbing look at exploitative daytime talk shows, online predators and clueless parents with their siblings, rebellious angst. As we listen to the contestants they confess their own harrowing experiences, each one more traumatic than the last; crying, audience anguish and theme music, punctuate the carefully crafted narratives delivering unto us an entertaining film script filled with monsters, sunflowers, manicured gardens, horror stories, cockroaches, people on fire, garbage and people pissing on themselves. The anti-verse that unfolds before our eyes asks us to reflect on how we function as a society in response to these new real and virtual spaces of interaction, how we might respond to the political dimensions of these expanded sites of inhabitation, and how they might also represent a more troubling scenario for the possibility of dissent or opposition in our media saturated culture.