Title: You Got Walter Benjamined

Artist: Benjamin Poynter

Medium: Installation, digital game and video

'You Got Walter Benjamined' is an experimental hybrid of a gameplay video, with DDR and BlueMarsLite, and stop motion animation with Google Maps iOS to illustrate the disintegration of 'value' via digital prosthetic and Marxist theory. It is an extension of my own identity as a Japanese-American who has never been to Asia, yet always feels it possible through the mystifying advent of videogames. It takes the ultimate form of an experimental music video, where I replace the existing song with my own at exact BPM. I substitute lyrics with sentences from 'The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction". Per description seen online : The distance between two cities shortens in time. In this experimental music video, it is the lone heart of America and the celestial shores of Japan. Where we live and places we dream about are not so different. The prosthetic potential for achieving destiny presents a sigh of relief and caution. With such haptic interfaces and tools at our disposal, even the most rustic visions of places away become concrete. Tokyo, I'm coming home.