Game Art: Kent Sheely's "YouTube Shooter" (2013)

Kent Sheely's new Game Art project provocatively mixes the visuality of first-person shooters games with the aesthetics of another popular genre, YouTube tour videos. The result is a potentially lethal voyeuristic experience set in simulated spaces (Disneyworld, a truly dystopian-Escape from Toworrow kind of non-place), global mega-museums (Paris' Le Louvre), Southern Californian gated communities with a history of celebrity violence (Brentwood), and former-Jugoslavian urban/unsettling settings (Zagreb, the capital of Croatia). Four levels in total, but I do foresee expansions packs and plenty of DLC.

Fresh from watching Alexandre Moors' Blue Caprice - a recent film that "investigates the notorious and horrific Beltway sniper attacks from the point of view of the two killers, whose distorted father-son relationship facilitated their long and bloody journey across America" - I tend to see the more sinister implications of Sheely's project, which perhaps makes it even more compelling. [In case you are wondering, yes, FPS games do make an appearance in Blue Caprice. Specifically, Doom. And yes, one character does play videogames while smoking crack and yes, he does go on a killing spree shortly after that. Check, check, check].

Now, as you may remember, a few years ago, Pool Worldwide, a Dutch advertising agency founded in 2006, added a first person shooter HUD interface to

Google Streetview to simulate "killings" - the "player" could "follow" pedestrians in the streets of different cities and "shoot" them point blank, with an M4A1 machine gun, although such action did not produce visible consequences (in other words, the "game" was not truly "interactive" or, rather, the expected feedback - i.e., the victim falls, bleeds, and dies - was missing). As journalist Sean Ludwig wrote in 2011:

[I]f you ever wanted to see what it was like to go around shooting up your neighborhood, this “game” gives you vague sense of what it’s like. I briefly tested the project by running around downtown New York City, where I live. Google Street View shows tons of people and landmarks in crisp enough detail that it makes the experience equal amounts bizarre and creepy. The game lets you go around killing pedestrians and police officers, who are real people unwittingly captured by Google’s cameras. (source: VentureBeat)

Titled Google Shoot View, the project was immediately condemned by pretty much everybody - I had not seen such a harsh reaction since the release of JFK Reloaded, circa 2004 - and it was shortly removed/banned/shot dead by Google for - interestingly enough - copyright infringement.

Google Shoot View, image via VentureBeat

YouTube Shooter

Kent Sheely

Submitted by Matteo Bittanti