Body Hack is a full body interactive cinematic role hacking karaoke game. It allows players to hack iconic cinematic or televisual figures with their own body and their on-screen double. It triggers one’s desire of imitating known personae in a hilarious situation. Nevertheless, it raises
critical issues of our embodied experience with the mediated body.
As a cinematic game, Body Hack creates a space for audience to rethink the relationship between media and themselves. Through the full-body interactive system, audience is requested to perform under visual instructions. A projection will be presented with a paused movie and a character’s posture as a green contour. Player will see his/her on-screen double as TV static. The setup requests the player to fit in corresponding gestures, and the continuous synchronization of movement will progress the movie frame-by-frame as if the audience’s performance becomes the media’s time. The perfect combination of gestures serves as a key to dissolve the TV static, and to reveal the player’s appearance on the screen replacing the original character.
Under such setting, the game invites players to engage in an uncanny body rhythm and movement under the constraint of media. It provides a space for players to immerse in compelling cinematic environments, which blur the line between identity and representation, and the relationship between self, media and pop-culture. It attempts foreground the audiences’ awareness of the pervasive influences of media through the physical body.
