Feng Membo @ PS1/MoMA

As a person that grew up in Asia at one point in my life, there is a certain kind of nostalgia that comes with games like street fighter and super mario. At home, they are the small boxes, about 2' x 3', of colorful noises and low-resolution action; ones that hitting the buttons arbitrarily (there are all of two) with much force and speed, in multiples of 100, is your best strategy for winning. Somehow there is a culture of people, hierarchy, and space that is only obvious after experiencing first-hand. If you normally just walk by, it might just seems like a random placement of objects with seats that are clearly too small for even a 12 year old. But there is rank of people, a small hush when the real experts of the game come by to play, and order, which, if you are not very good, you really don't get to play much, just watch. There is a specific technique to not spill over too much in front of the store next door and an unspoken reason and joy for why these certain games are too small in size. Regardless that they look as if 3 year old toddlers should be playing there, I know that most of the participants' ages range from 12 to 18, some that are above 180 cm tall. After accepting these games for what they are, much like people, you start to enjoy them for the abnormal qualities, and associate a familiar comfort with them. So, Feng Membo's Long March: Restart was a strange trip. Half of me saw the enormity of the installation and decided it was the ultimate gamer's dream. But, for the rest, it was disconcerting to have a space that, for me, used to consist of a 10 foot cube, suddenly transform into an in-my-face 150 foot long corridor. It was a paradoxical feeling, being in a place that is both childhood oriented but clearly with more adult motivations, familiar and unfamiliar, with a tactile medium but a scale that was ungraspable. And to me, the distance from what it used to be, forced me to see street fighter/super mario in a completely different light. There was an organization to the game, and a distortion that was happening at various stages of the installation, from the super pixels to the game itself. The scale also placed the viewers as interact-ers, both as the game controller but also being inside the game. There was a slight shift in paradigm (although subtle) when observing a game set-up like this. Something I think installations of this sort should do more often.