Game Face

Robbie Cooper – Immersion

In an age where electronic media plays an increasingly large part in our everyday lives, it is quite refreshing to discover a project concerned with our reactions to media rather than with the media itself. Safe to say that upon discovering Robbie Cooper’s Immersion yesterday, I was suitably drawn into its exploration of kid’s reactions to playing video games.

As part of an expansive work which also documents 2 year olds watching Monsters Inc. and a selection of folk at least 20 years their senior watching porn

 for Wallpaper* Magazine, Cooper uncovers the remarkable perfunctory twitches and glares that we execute when glued to the screen. At first glance of the photographs on Cooper’s website , it is difficult to work out quite what is going on as the reactions are so varied. Some are clenched in concentration, others are slack jawed as a post-op Jack Nicholson in One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest, while one child (playing Hulk apparently) is sat teary eyed.

The photographs are wonderful in the sense that they capture blissful moments of people completely unguarded, something that is extremely difficult to achieve through regular means of portraiture. While they should very much be recognised as thus and certainly not discarded, Cooper’s project becomes all the more absorbing when presented as a short film. Here, these moments of what he quite poignantly has identified as ‘immersion’ are given further resonance when cast along with more conscious reactions. In a brief video

in which he discusses the project, Cooper reveals that these ‘moments’ often last little more than a second, with the HD filming process’ high frame rate allowing him to successfully seize them in all their glory.