At the beginning of our last year at Cranbrook, students were tasked with giving short presentations of our work, preceded by an introductory video of our departments as a whole. For the 2D department’s introduction, I created a video that featured each student as a custom wrestler in the video game WWE 2k22.1 It was a compilation of all of our avatars wrestling, performing suplexes on one another and pushing each other off of steel ladders. 2
I quickly learned a lot about the mechanics of the game through this process. I spent hours with my studiomates experimenting with the limits of manipulating the in-game camera. I realized that the depth of field of the footage could be adjusted to create more cinematic shots and that this virtual camera could be moved outside of the wrestling ring and focused on virtual subjects other than the wrestlers.
These realizations opened up a new way of understanding the game and exploring its world. I began to take cinematic photos of the audience members, documenting them as subjects and observing the ways they functioned as part of this synthetic environment.
The title, I’m Here for You, is meant to be interpreted in two ways: as an imagined voice from an audience member to the wrestlers, and as an allusion to the fact that the virtual crowd was created just to watch you play this game (or emulate spectatorship). In the real world, an audience is captivated. It is an attentive body—often huge in size—that brings a performance into the larger cultural matrix. The virtual audience does neither, instead they help create the illusion of being watched while remaining completely impartial to the events unfolding in front of them. Likewise, the audience members in this virtual world are not meant to be looked at—the crowd is composed of about ten characters, repeated and scattered amongst one another. Sometimes, three of the same character wearing the same clothes stand together and move in unison.
This work is situated in a long-standing conversation around the reuse of media for the purpose of remixing or reframing the original source material. Specific to gaming, I have been interested in the practice of “speedrunning” where people try to beat games as quickly as possible by any means possible. In Harry Potter and the Chamber of Secrets on PC, Harry can float through walls if you adjust the game’s brightness settings while holding onto a ledge.3 Large sections of the game can be skipped by initiating a quidditch game in the middle of a long section. However, it is faster to lose a quidditch game than to win it, so players will aggressively ram Harry into as many obstacles as possible to make him lose quickly.4
The art of speedrunning creates two parallel understandings of a single piece of media; one is about the experience of the story and embodying a character, and the other is about understanding the game itself as a tool to be manipulated. Reframing the game in this way also reimagines how a character, controlled to act erratically in the interest of speed, exists within the narrative intended to be played out throughout the game. In the Harry Potter games it is also interesting to consider what it means to navigate this world as the digital avatar of a child actor.
I’m Here for You interacts with WWE 2k22 in a way similar to speedrunning, reframing virtual objects outside of their supposed function and imbuing them with a new meaning. British theorist and cyberneticist Stafford Beer coined the phrase “the purpose of a system is what it does,” meaning that the true function of a system exists within its real-world application (and outside of its supposed function).5 Through this project, WWE 2K22 exists both as a wrestling game and as a program that allows its user to take cinematic photographs of a virtual audience.
This project is a representation (Risograph print) of a representation (photograph) of a representation (video game) of a representation (wrestling) of a fight. Professional wrestling is already so distant to the idea of real-world violence. Then, with each new cycle of representation, the subjects involved become distorted yet another time through translation. In I’m Here for You are the traces of the original event that exist within the copy of the copy of the copy.
Even if the audience pictured is an uneasy depiction of viewership, its very existence on the margins of the game points to the attention of the game’s makers to its spaces nearly out of sight. This project is about documenting an alien world and trying to find humanity within it. Even if the audience isn’t watching, they were still made to be there for you.
Once you find them, you see the hands of two audience members touching, a man giving a thumbs-down, and a woman covering her face in the crowd. These moments hint at stories—at how a viewer could see a bit of themselves in these subjects. Or maybe even in the person taking the photographs, observing the observers.
Moving the camera beyond the walls of the wrestling arena, I found buildings with the word “BUILDING” adorning their facades scattering a barren, gray landscape.