Sports, and soccer in particular, as a subject for interactive exercises was the theme of the international DreamGame multimedia project executed the weekend before last at Kyiv’s Dynamo Stadium.
Without doubt, the project participants, artists from various countries, facilitated their task by choosing the stadium as their scene of action, since a stadium is a ready exposition space perfectly fit for any kind of performance. To put it more eloquently, a stadium is a superbly powerful lens to focus the audience’s attention. The exhibition organizers promised a whole park of computer entertainment: robot battles, colorfully painted soccer pitch, an indicator board transformed into a lyrics draft notebook, video films, stylish DJ sound, etc. However, the stadium itself instantly made it a self-sufficient entertainment machine: the first among the surprises of the evening became Andriy Shevchenko, who appeared to have an insistent need for training this very evening. The renowned forward with a plastered nose running around an inoperative installation represented a surrealistic sight all by himself. Compared to him, even the promised robots looked less spectacular: a couple dozens of jumping metal things reminding one of an insane lawnmower. Another mechanism named Blisset, which the public was supposed to drive from pillar to post, amazingly resembled a shabby cart escaping from its driver and endlessly happy to do so.
Perhaps the most successful moment in the DreamGame, after Shevchenko’s mysterious appearance and equally mysterious vanishing, was a joint audio-visual work by several artists. The lights dimmed, the colored neon snowflake in the center of the pitch came to life (authors — Sabina Lang and Daniel Baumann, Switzerland), and the music by Kyiv experimental composer Oleksandr Nesterov began to sound from the loudspeakers. Floodlight rays searching through the pitch snatched out of darkness the figure of a supernumerary wearing a soccer uniform, moving along the lines of a gigantic sketch occupying the entire field. This overstepped the limits of a standard interactive attraction. The sight left practically no chance for estrangement, involved the spectator, resembling a disturbed twilight dream. They were dreams of power, remembrance of the 1942 so-called Death Match between Dynamo and the German Luftwaffe, the fascination by the age of mass spectacles when the biggest catastrophe is simultaneously the biggest sight — there were many meanings there, some of them perhaps not envisaged by the authors themselves. It was a truly powerful, to some extent even inhuman, spectacle. After that funny fights of the automatic machines and Biennale video by Swiss Ingeborge Lucier (white collars driving notebooks at a soccer pitch) looked at least light-weight.
Maybe this is exactly what the newfangled multimedia exercises lack: scale. Manifesting substantial topics, they turn them into a grotesque copy of their own ideas, into just another video game. The winner will be the one able to comprehend at least instinctively the fear of power and life not only in himself but in others.
