STEFFANIE PADILLA

ONLOOKERS

machinima/digital video, color, sound, 3’ 04”, 2021, United States of America

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Onlookers is a work of video art that features the popular arcade shooter game Big Buck HD Hunter, a hunting simulator. By refusing to play the game as designed (that is, pulling the trigger and killing the animals), the work raises questions about human intervention, environmental utopia, the effects of the gaze, and active participation through looking.

THE ARTIST

Steffanie Padilla is an artist, researcher, and educator. She works with different media and materials and holds a MFA in Photography from Rhode Island School of Design and a Bachelor of Fine Arts in Photography, from California State University of Long Beach. She is the founder of Mass Media Research Point. She is based in Southern California and Copenhagen, Denmark.

ARTIST STATEMENT

“Before learning how to read, I learned how to play video games. One of the first games I remember playing was Duck Hunt, a video game simple enough for a child to play. Using a plastic toy revolver-style handgun called the NES Zapper, I would aim and fire at the flying ducks (not the dog) that appeared on screen. This specific blip of a memory was one I reconnected to while visiting a mall arcade in Massachusetts and seeing a child pointing a toy gun at a TV screen. The video work titled Onlookers uses a contemporary version of an animal shooter game called Big Buck Hunter HD where the player is instructed to shoot animals that run across the screen. When comparing the two games, the difference in graphics struck me on how real one felt (an utopian nature) while holding a realistic rifle attached to the game. Initially, I was led by an act of refusal to participate in a “game” that is inherently violent towards animals and having this urge to create an alternative narrative free of death. Onlookers is a piece created by recording the screen of Big Buck Hunter HD. Post-editing of the recording focuses on the frantic behavior of the animals being hunted.

The original voice actor who says, “The great outdoors never looked so good!” and "All of nature’s beauty in high def!” is removed and replaced with looping sounds of chirping birds sourced from the internet. The edited sound is meant to

contrast the high-stress and rapidly sequence scenes, with that of serenity. But because the chirping ceases to stop, the birds seem to also be part of the panic-stricken scenes. The work in its first iteration is three minutes and thirty-seconds long and is projected on a wall measuring 15 feet by 10 feet. The size of the projection is meant to invoke a sense of real space and implicate viewers in the looking. For future edits, I plan to include more animal shooter games, extend the time duration, use my own audio recordings of birds, and program a motion detector to trigger the animal stampede. Though I am critical of games and its moving images, video games will always hold a special place in my heart and will continue to find ways to intervene.”

(Steffanie Padilla, Synapse Not Found: Animal As Image—Media Ecology, 2021, p. 4)

ONLOOKERS

machinima/digital video (1920 x 1080), color, sound, 3’ 04”, 2021, United States of America

Created by Steffanie Padilla

Made with Big Buck Hunter HD (Play Mechanix, 2012)