BitWeenLightPong · SonicPong
Pong, rebuilt as architecture: a ball of light that arcs overhead, and a ball of sound you have to shout across the room.
I — The workConcept
BitWeen is a series of game installations derived from Pong, the first video game most people ever played. Where the original reduced two players to two paddles on a screen, BitWeen gives the game back its physics and its players back their bodies.
In LightPong, a ball of light travels on a parabolic trajectory through a suspended arc of lamps, struck back by the players' own light. In SonicPong, the ball is a voice: shout into your racket and the sound travels through thirty speakers to your opponent. In both, the rally quickens until someone misses.
II — DocumentationPlates
III — The storyMaking & meaning
We were interested in what is lost when a game becomes an image. Pong is a game about distance and timing, yet on a screen both are imaginary. BitWeen restores them — the ball has to physically cross the space between two people.
Early versions were tested as field trials made for a primary school. Our documentation of the hanging — lights and speakers suspended rung by rung in the museum — is as much part of the work as the game itself.
BitWeen now lives permanently at MadaTech in Haifa, where it is played every day by visitors who never think of it as art, which may be the best thing that can happen to it.