People Watching

People Watching
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At Documenta Harun Farocki’s Deep Play shows us various perspectives on the final of the 2006 World Cup. We see the ‘clean feed’, the television networks’ raw material, we see individual players on both teams, we see computer generated representations of the game, we see maps of the flow of play. Across four groups of three screens the action proceeds in simultaneous ‘real time’, action and simulation, abstraction and manipulation. This is an intelligent and integral multiplicity, a spectacle that interrogates the processes and technology that produces it. Further to this the spectator to the installation actively engages in producing their own experience, watching is creative, we are reminded how much activity in these exhibitions consists of people looking and watching and how active is that looking and watching.