Game Art: Florent Deloison's "Quand les hamsters régnaient sur la terre" (2013)
In 2013, Florent Deloison (b. 1983 in Amiens, France) developed Quand les hamsters régnaient sur la terre (When Hamsters ruled the Earth), as part of a residency in Cergy, outside of Paris. This interactive installation is set in a fictional universe where hamsters took control of the planet and reduced men to slavery - would that be great, by the way? The project includes Hamster Olympics, a racing game inspired by Konami's seminal Track 'n Field (1983). In this version, however, humans and animals compete against each other. The hamster "runs" in a wheel equipped with sensors that will record the speed of his movements and transcribe the screen while the human player is tracked by a Kinect camera. A second game, Hamster Olympics: Fish Edition, features a swimming goldfish and a human player. A camera placed above the aquarium captures the movement of fish and translates it onto the screen. The human player is supposed to mimic swimming motions facing a Kinect sensor. Last bur not least is Mormyre tennis, a game originally developed in 2007 by Deloison, that allows non-human players to compete against a goldfish. As Delois writes:
I wanted to use game design to create an interface between the animal and human world, both sharing the same space, the same temporality, but without understanding or sometimes ignoring one another. The game becomes a platform for communication between two species. I framed this interaction through an anthropomorphic fable where animals have replaced humans and appropriated the planet and exploiting its occupants selfishly under the excuse of speciesm.LINK
Submitted by Matteo Bittanti