In 2001, Mark Allen and his collaborators at C-level—an art cooperative in a basement in Los Angeles’s Chinatown—wired together a PlayStation, some electrodes, and a few photoreactive sensors to create a physio-cybernetic hybrid game they called Tekken Torture Tournament. It was hacking as performance art: the basement became a gallery in which visitors took turns playing a version of Tekken that shocked the user when the video-game characters got wounded. The experiment was a success, paving the way for Mark Allen to explore his interest in computer games as an artistic medium by developing a whole series of event-slash-installations. Allen is now a faculty member in the art department at Pomona College, where his program is called DARPA (Digital Art Related Program Activities) and offers courses in Computer Programming for Artists and Electron Wrangling for Beginners. As his official bio states, Mark continues to search for “interesting ways of mixing art with electricity.”

—Joshuah Bearman

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I. “YOUR BODY IS AN ELECTRICAL SYSTEM”

THE BELIEVER: How did you come up with the concept for Tekken Torture Tournament?

MARK ALLEN: The exploratory idea was the avatar, and what directional control you have over it. The avatar is a stand-in for you. But what happens to you, or your avatar, only returns to you in the form of visual stimulus. So the idea with Tekken Torture Tournament was to create a closer bond between you and the avatar with an actual physical response.

BLVR: Hence the electric shocks.

MA: We created a system where you personally got a shock to your arm when your character got hit in the game. The shock was strong enough to make your arm pull your hand off the controller, so you literally lost the ability to fight back as you got injured in the game.

BLVR: It stung that much?

MA: It’s not that it stung that much. Your body is an electrical system. So your muscles move automatically when given a charge.

BLVR: Did you have to figure out the right charge?

MA: It pretty much works that if you turn it up, it hurts more and you get a stronger contraction. It was very in-tense. It could actually lock your arm into place. It was a hard involuntary contraction.

BLVR: How did that system interact with the game?

MA: We wanted to get the data out of the PlayStation without getting into the code or anything like that. So instead, we kind of hacked a solution by placing photo sensors on the TV screen, setting the screen to black and white, and reading the hue changes as your energy bar went down. As you became more...