The Mantua Music and Arts Festival, Co. Roscommon, Ireland, 2007

Street Fighter vs. Bum Fights (in a field)

This piece is basically a performative mash-up the classic fighting video game, “Street Fighter,” and the controversial videos of homeless people fighting on the street called, “Bum Fights.” It is also a comparison of the way video games are paid for with coins and the way that street performers collect coins from their pedestrian audiences.

The idea was basically to make some over-sized arcade controls and a few other video game props so that people in the audience could control the video game characters (my friends and me) while they fought. What I really liked about the piece was the idea that the characters who were fighting each other were not responsible for their actions, supposedly the people with the fake arcade controllers were (which was sort of a satire of the way that contemporary democratic governments actually behave). The characters in the game were just supposed to be average people who you might see in a real street fight, and the controls were made out of refuse or materials commonly found on the street.

I really like that the only documentation of the piece is on YouTube because it means someone in the audience decided that they wanted to document their personal experience with the piece in the same way that a witness to a real street fight chooses to document their experience and upload it onto Youtube.