Felix Stephan Huber: “TUNNEL”
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Felix Stephan Huber: TUNNEL
TUNNEL, from: ego alter ego
Installation, computergame, 2009
For 14 years, Felix Stephan Huber has been working with computer games – in the case of TUNNEL with the game engine Unreal Engine 2 – changing them into existential realms of experience between reality and virtuality. The installation of TUNNEL is centred around a tunnel shaped like the tunnel in the game that is projected on it and an avatar of the player we can control and who meet other figures on their way. Like in an ego-shooter game the spaces have to be crossed bodily to reach the next level. This work now, as opposed to earlier works by Felix Stephan Huber, has no real context at all; this game world is reduced to minimal recognisability: stereotypes, cyborg-like men and women, austere black-and-white, mobile cubes simulating a 3-D space in an abysmal universe, and short dialogues with instructions and comments yield an eerie scenario.
TUNNEL is a meta-game, a play about playing, a game about the search for one’s self. It uses the typical facets of a computer game like violence, sex or eroticism, and mechanisation in a reductionist way, and changes them into a seemingly universal life game. The reduced but exemplary bodily actions – flaps in the face or kisses and philosophical conversations – were created in the style of the body-centred performances of the seventies. Then, everything had to be experienced with the help of and by the body, now everything has to be experienced by an interface creating a distance. Yet, everything is still focused on the body, on control, and on subjectivity. Thus, TUNNEL explicitly refers to that ‘I’ in the game that I can usually simply direct and control but that, in this case, again and again stops and looks at me and reveals itself as fiction: “Follow me. I see you at the end of the tunnel.”