Overview of experience (written in 2018)

For several years, I have thought about art and the role art might play in the popular public consciousness. Typically, I have been weary of creating art I might deem overtly political, yet a call to engage has grown as things have become increasingly grim with our current administration. The general population seems more focused on being entertained and titillated, on simplistic activity and spectacle, than even a modest inquiry into the collective psyche of the United States.

I have been working on a project loosely titled Rushmore / All Mine, which includes the creation of a website and an associated smartphone game. The first half of the project is a website that is built to mimic a National Park Service web portal. It features a live video stream of Mt. Rushmore, with the footage pulled from an actual live camera feed from Mt. Rushmore. Over a period of several months, a landfill builds (digitally superimposed) in front of and on top of Mt. Rushmore. This happens extremely gradually, and will only be apparent by returning over a period of time. As the trash piles build, seagulls circle in the sky, a crane is built to push garbage, dump trucks appear with increasing frequency, and the national monument gradually becomes a garbage dump. The project will end when the facade of Mt. Rushmore is barely visible. The garbage will be added to the landfill based on real-time data. This real-time data will be received from the second half of the project: A custom built smartphone video game available for free to the public on the Apple App Store (iPhone and iPad) and Google Play (Android devices). In this game, the player/viewer will control a humanoid character running through an endless cityscape, with the goal of picking up as much 'stuff' as possible: fast food, cars, electronics, domesticated animals, weapons… an endless array of goodies. The game theme and play follows a well established popular genre of video games, the endless runner, except for one element: every time a user picks up one of the umpteen useless pickups and prizes in the game, a message is sent to the Rushmore cam, and a piece of garbage is dropped into the landfill. The casual, mindless, stuff-acquiring activity of the player is the real time data filling the landfill.

I would like the piece to be visually engaging, thoughtful, live and ongoing; something that keeps viewers/players returning for the duration of the project. I want the piece to actively engage the public in a dialog around our collective appetite for 'stuff' and how it affects the ecosystem of our minds and the environment, including a public that may not normally interact with art projects.

I have created designs and programmed basic functionality of the experience, and am ready to move forward with the next phase, which will include collaborating with other designers and video game programmers.