Document:Q9801

What would be left behind at the end of a videogame?
Evidencia #000 is at once; a police forensic space, a video game made real, it is what remains after the level has been completed, marked out by striped tape as if it were a crime scene. This is a space in which everything has been frozen, the player has gone, leaving only the viewer as a voyeur, a witness.
The 'game' is joined at the scene of a slaughter in the gallery, silent, bloody, grisly but understated, a melancholic place. A trail of blood traces the progression through a closed door. The next part of the level is obscured, perhaps it is a silent passage through cellers or a basement, perhaps an intense battle up a stairway into a neighbouring yard. The viewer rejoins the struggle from a distance - denied access by the striped tape that defines the edges of the game map; a high blood stained wall over which something has fallen, climbed, been dragged. The game area continues through the garden, winding between tress, a space cleared of debris, watered so it is a lighter shade of green from the viewers world. The trees have carefully placed leaves at their bases that suggest in-game textured planes to smooth the transition from one polygon to the next. The end of the level approaches; a pond, still, with a piece of white cloth suspended beneath the surface, the other end pulled taut over the side, dissapearing into a partially opened manhole cover. The only sounds; the city beyond the walled garden, the incessant sound of water pouring into the drains beneath the city: the end of the level...
Evidencia#000 is the first part of a new series of works that explore the relationship between the 'real' and the 'game space'. Since coming across a fatal motorcycle crash, where a busy London street in rush hour was cordoned off, transformed into a silent, macabre 'set', I have been fascinated with the way that the forensic space dislocates the 'familiar'. The resultant sterile space, where every trace of activity, every fragment of debris is given potential significance, where scientists move in to analyse and de-construct the events, is in direct contrast to the First Person Shooter game space where players engage the tropes of massacre and desruction to advance through the level, leaving massive evidence trails with no apparent consequence. So what would happen if the game had consequences, what would happen to the remains?