Room With a Mew
Room with a mew is an interactive installation inspired by glitches in video games. The piece uses computer vision to distort an 8-bit sprite of the pokémon Mew based on the movements of the viewer. Glitches in video games circumvent the rigid structures put in place by the rules of the system. They can provide players with an advantage, a shortcut, or an interesting experience outside the scope of the game. At times this experience can border on uncanny, especially when familiar characters are corrupted in some way. In order to trigger a glitch event, a player must often perform a specific movement or carry out a series of actions within the game. Room with a Mew transfers this in game movement into real space, allowing viewers to trigger a glitch by walking back and forth across the image, or performing random gestures in front of it. Mew was chosen as subject matter due to the instability caused by its inclusion in the first generation of pokémon games and the mythology that sprung from the mysterious nature of the glitches within those games.