New York Times Immersion photo portfolio & video
The NY Times just put up a portfolio of pictures from Immersion!! It’s going in the magazine on Sunday. And an online video featuring American as well as British kids. It’s great to see it up- and good to see that my buddies got credited in both the Times and the Telegraph. I especially like the phrase “organizational brain, Charly Smith”…
November 22nd, 2008 at 7:43 pm
Amazing! Can I put a screenshot of that video on my blog with a link to it??
November 22nd, 2008 at 7:59 pm
Sure! Thanks
November 22nd, 2008 at 8:00 pm
Cool! Thanks to you!
November 22nd, 2008 at 9:40 pm
Oh I saw, there is a portfolio of sharper pictures too. So I took one of these – I hope it’s okay.
November 24th, 2008 at 2:40 am
I loved the photos and video!
Were the kids playing the games backwards? I’m assuming you filmed through a two way mirror / teleprompter of some sort?
November 25th, 2008 at 10:25 pm
Are all those kids over the age of 15 ?
November 26th, 2008 at 10:20 pm
How old are these kids? Several of the games they are playing are rated M and are not judged suitable for children under 17 or 18 (depending on your location).
November 26th, 2008 at 10:49 pm
That’s true, and they are almost all too young to be playing, from a ratings point-of-view. However, they all already play the games they are depicted playing and their parents gave their consent and signed model release forms.
The fact is that kids do play these games. I’m interested to see how different kids respond to violence, not just in video games, but in the media generally. See how they respond to it in different types of media. Specifically I’m going to look at war, because it’s outside of most kid’s experience.
I remember, at their age, being fascinated by war. It was a big part of a lot of games that my friends and I used to play. But we’d play them in the fields or woods and make camps or whatever. A friend of mine recently sent me a link to a story;
http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/technology/7746471.stm
This is an interesting point of view, since it comes from someone working on the ground. He is pretty harsh about parents, since they are also just trying to cope with modern life- in most families both parents work nowadays and life is a balancing act. But I’m interested in his insight into why some kids are more vulnerable than others. Infact I think I’d like to talk to him. What I’m doing is a process, and what you saw, wherever you saw it, was not the end product…
November 27th, 2008 at 2:00 am
I have a question about the black child who cries at 1:58 in the NYT video. I find that the most intriguing part of the whole film. Can you offer any explanation of what was happening in the game at that time?
November 27th, 2008 at 4:39 am
Drew was tearing up because he wasn’t blinking. He stops blinking when he plays video games. So, its not emotion, it’s an unusual level of concentration or immersion.
November 30th, 2008 at 4:48 pm
Sure you’ve probably heard this…but this is a ripoff of a series a NY photog, Phil Toledano did many many years ago.
try a little originality
November 30th, 2008 at 5:05 pm
Well, Shauna Frischkorn did it before Toledano, as you can see here;
http://shaunafrischkorn.com/portfolio.html
So I guess that means that Toledano’s are a ripoff? What’s interesting is that Fischkorn’s pictures feature real expressions, whereas Toledano’s (to anyone who doesn’t suffer from Asperger’s) seem ott. Apparently he used his friends, and it looks to me like his friends were acting.
Mine, you’ll notice, is a video. With stills lifted from the video. And they are looking into the lens. Whilst both Frischkorn and Toledano’s subjects are not. But more to the point, you’ll also notice that although they are all essentially portraits, my work is dealing with a different theme. In other words, it isn’t saying the same thing. From a visual point of view, I wouldn’t have done it if I hadn’t been able to get eye contact, and be very close, with a reasonably wide-angle lens. A huge part of the point of doing this was to create intimacy and to engage with their sensation. In an intense, almost voyeuristic way. I like Frischkorn’s work and was pointed to it whilst I was shooting tests for this. But I think it has a very different feeling.
The person who really made me think of this was Errol Morris (as I’ve already said), as well as the experience of going to internet cafe’s in Seoul and Shanghai.
December 1st, 2008 at 1:42 am
Filming kids playing games clearly rated as not suitable for their age is akin in my mind to filming kids watching horror movies , erotica or war footage. Appropriate for adults but not kids.
Whether the parents think this is fine or not as an artist you have benefited from having these kids exposed to inappropriate media.
You crossed a line in this work which I find unfortunate and certainly outside of what I would consider ethically acceptable.
December 1st, 2008 at 6:00 am
I didn’t expose them, “rod”, they already played those games. Do you think that kids are not exposed to age-inappropriate material, in the course of normal day to day life, regardless of whether they play these games or not?
December 2nd, 2008 at 12:04 pm
Isn’t that pretty much the same as saying that its okay if you molest them, because they were already molested by their parents? Its not okay. Game ratings are there for a reason. No matter what their parents decided, your use of that in your subject matter serves only one of two purposes.
1. Normalizing the use of inappropriate material by minors.
2. Defaming the industry that produces this material as a retorical subtext.
Either it is disingenuous at least and unethical at worst. Don’t get me wrong. The material is interesting and compelling. However, two sections in particular are provocative. The first shows a seven year old child playing a game he is explicitly too young for… while crying. The other shows another child playing a game he is too young for while the games sexually explicit audio plays in the background.
I find that offensive. The people watching this video on the NY Times can’t hear your explaination for the crying boy. The viewer has no knowledge that these games were rated by the Industry that produced them as being adult content. So there is no explanation for the sexually explicit audio, except that you have exploited these children and their either negligent or at least overly permissive parents to produce your work.
Anyone without a significant level of awareness of video games will look at this work and conclude that video games are bad for children. In that way, I think this piece, though intriguing, does alot to hurt the medium of video games. As a member of ‘the Media’, your work is irresponsibe.
December 2nd, 2008 at 12:42 pm
Well, if you are saying that playing a violent game is as traumatizing as being molested by your parents, then you are the one who is doing violent video games a disservice. I would equate it to asking a child who smokes, to light a cigarette so that I can take a picture of them. Even that is overdoing it, since cigarette smoking is addictive and lethal, whilst video games don’t have nearly the same potency.
The video game is no longer in its infancy, it can take material that is strong. GTA 4 made half a billion dollars in it’s first week. The industry that produces those games doesn’t really need or want special treatment. The fact that children play these games is a social reality. The fact that it’s a social reality that you find hard to look at is not my problem.
The video game industry has no corporate responsibility programs whatsoever. For an industry of its size, maturity and revenue, that is basically unacceptable. Video games are not only a social reality they also have a huge social impact. It’s not always a positive one. I’m not saying that video games are negative. But an industry that has such a huge impact on society should put real money into, for example, centers like the one I linked to above.
And as for “adult content”- well that’s debatable. There are two separate issues- there’s the ratings, which is one thing and then there’s the nature of the content, which is another. To call the “adult” nature of the content in most video games “mature” would be really stretching the definition of maturity a long way. What it is, is weirdly fetishized and childish. The standard of writing in video games is terrible, if you compare it to writing for novels or even movies. I think what’s happening is that video game companies are turning into large corporations like any other, and that massively informs the way in which games are made.
I don’t think that my work hurts the medium of video games in any way at all. If I did I wouldn’t do it. I play video games myself and like them. That doesn’t mean that I think that they are above reproach. I think that there are things that need to be improved and worked on. That’s all.
December 2nd, 2008 at 1:54 pm
Oh by the way, in response to your parting shot, about me being a representative of “The Media”? There’s something that you should look into, if you imagine that I am part of a huge structure that has some overarching agenda.
I am on my own- I work for myself and sell material to “The Media”. Video games companies, however, are increasingly owned by larger companies that also own broadcast and print media interests. The trend is that the video games divisions of these larger companies are hugely more profit making than the companies that own the “news” sections of their interests. You do the maths.
December 3rd, 2008 at 11:57 pm
Hi Robbie,
Forgive me if I haven’t read enough into your work.
I am interested to know if you are conducting experiments on children playing non-violent video games, too. Without this, you will have nothing to compare your current “data” to. It would be unfortunate to see you blatantly omit this, even though it may water down the aesthetic you may be striving for.
It’s interesting that you have chosen to depict the children as video game characters. Your choice of lighting and colour treatment of the subjects clearly depicts them as though they were rendered in a video game.
Could you be putting too much of a slant on the representation of these children? By portraying the children as video game characters, and by not comparing their actions to players of non-violent video games, you may not be giving people enough room to make their own readings.
This is clearly a delicate issue and I think that you should be careful in how you manipulate your “data”.
December 4th, 2008 at 3:32 am
Hi Miek
I will be covering non violent games- as well as older people, people from different cultures and people using other types of media. The range of interpretation of the short piece that I’ve just done is already about as wide as it can go. From amusement to horror. Errol Morris has a phrase that he likes to use to describe this; “Believing is seeing”. Also, just on the level of how people take to individual players in the piece, there is a huge variety of preferences, for example some people think that Dexter, the kid with the headphones, is charming and engaging, whilst others want to kick his face in. It has to be said that how people respond to the kids themselves seems to inform how they respond to the video and what it’s saying.
My aim, more than anything else, is to get people to engage with their sensation. Guns and shooting are a very good route into that, but you’re right, there are others- driving, for example. Mirror’s Edge looks extremely interesting…
December 4th, 2008 at 8:50 am
I mean when I look at the video, I see children who are engrossed in the world they are playing in. It would be interesting to see children’s faces in a lot of learning situations… instead of this “cold emotional detatchment” many may read into the faces you depict, we might see “bored and indifferent” faces in the classroom.
December 4th, 2008 at 8:57 am
It’s true that one of the teachers who we work with thought that the kids who were unresponsive infront of the games, were unresponsive in class. I think I’m more interested in media than I am in the classroom. Do you know the work of Michael Wesch- I’ve posted a couple of things about him? I think his site is listed on the side of my blog- Digital Ethnography. He and people like him are more the place you’d go to for work about the classroom in the age of the internet etc.
December 4th, 2008 at 10:16 pm
The reason I bring up the classroom is less about my interests in educational settings, but more about my earlier point that you are not making any comparisons between children playing violent games and children engaged in other daily activities, such as learning.
Without such a comparison, it would be unfortunate if you were to make any statements or inferences about the effects of video games. Even you say yourself there is evidence that children can have the same appearance in other settings, too. This may say less about the direct impact of violent videogaming, and more about the broader environment of the child.
To reduce the issues here to children gaming in front of a screen, or simply down to media, would be a shame. I would be interested to see how and where your art/research can contribute to ongoing discussions about violent videogaming.
December 4th, 2008 at 10:55 pm
Well yes of course- that’s exactly the point. That’s why I was taking issue with the way that the Telegraph reported that quote (in the previous post). This study is not about effects per se, more about the subject of war as communicated by the different media. Violence is a part of war and a part of what is communicated by coverage of war and by a video game. But they do it in such different ways. A game is more about fun and sensation. The gamer or viewers “broader environment” or life experience would have to be crucial to how they relate to all of it.
December 5th, 2008 at 2:16 pm
If you don’t mind, I’ll be linking your blog and the NYT pieces in my blog. My rant will be related to others, but I’m eager to voice my concerns to my family of readers and use your art as a reference point.
December 5th, 2008 at 8:56 pm
Hi Lane- I’m not sure I understand you, when you say your rant will be related to others? Other subjects or people? Anyway- I’m always happy for my work to be used as a reference point and for people to be engaging with this! Many thanks.
December 24th, 2008 at 8:04 am
Great post.
http://www.newyork.eshophealthy.com/
February 28th, 2009 at 11:28 am
[...] via @swissmiss about a really great body of work created by NY based photographer and video artist Robbie Cooper along with Andrew Wiggins (camera man) and Charly Smith (First [...]
April 14th, 2009 at 4:07 am
Hi Robbie,
Would you mind sharing some of the technical info on camera, lens, lighting setup? Really impressed with your work. Did you use a Red camera?
I’m a photographer and producer living here in Tokyo Japan. if you’d like to try this with kids in Tokyo I’d be happy to help arrange.
April 29th, 2009 at 11:19 am
no answer. bummer
April 29th, 2009 at 11:26 am
Hi Max, my apologies, I didnt get notified about the first comment for some reason. Email me on cooper.robbie@gmail.com, Thanks, Robbie
May 7th, 2009 at 11:48 am
Hi Robbie,
I’ve actually sent u an email last week but i dint get any replies frm you. I’m wrking on a sch project which is just purely concept. The project tht i’m wrking on has similiarity on how ur wrk is done. Would u mind to share how u set ur things up to video this? It would be a great help.. Thx..