3pointD.com

The colorfully redesigned we make money not art links to an interesting experiment that was conducted recently at the International Symposium of Electronic Arts in San Jose. SIMVeillance brings passers-by on the plaza in front of the San Jose Museum of Art, where the festival was held, into the 3D virtual environment of The Sims 2 video game.

The project “elicits the viewer’s consideration of a normally fleeting urban phenomenon: the passage of strangers through a public space,” according to its makers.

Who are these people and where are they going? How does their traversal affect one’s perception of the vitality and nature of a place? This project seeks to make the viewer more aware of this phenomenon, as transmogrified when viewed through the lens of a computer game. By repurposing surveillance footage of a real-world place very close to where the viewer will be experiencing the work, SIMVeillance also asks the viewer to consider the increasing presence of recording devices within the urban landscape, and the possibility of leaving traces that linger in unexpected ways.

One question both the post and the project page leave unanswered is just how these passers-by were brought into the game, manually or through some automated process? In any case, the installation raises interesting questions about not just surveillance but our ability to re-create the real world in a virtual environment and what that might mean going forward.