The piece is about a micro process that we magnified to reveal its specific kind of labor. The process is the game-controller inputs that initiate a special move in the fighting-competition video game, Street Fighter II. This is something so twitchy and tiny and specific that an onlooker would overlook it completely, only seeing the flashy moves appear on the TV screen. Removing the visuals was a happily appropriate restriction that placed the emphasis on the sounds of clacky joysticks and buttons. At full speed, the sound of thumbs flicking and tapping at the controller is still unrecognizable. What the recording contains is a string of audio peaks that document the precise movements of thumbs required to perform a special attack. Once those buttons are pressed, a recorded voice shouts “Hadouken!” A blue fireball would fly across the television screen at this point and that’s what an audience would see fleetingly and then forget.
Working on this process piece was another way to learn more about collaboration and exploring new ideas, and like the round robin project, pushed us out of our comfort zones. For example, the video game aspect of this project was familiar to one of us and new for another, and we both explored different senses of humour in a way that was new and eye-opening.
The human labor of this process is the rapid micro-movements of thumbs on a controller. It felt like we were channeling Angry Video Game Nerd, who painstakingly describes tiny details and blows them out of proportion. The product of this move is a sound effect, an animation, and the attacking of an opponent. Normally with video game processes an onlooker can only think about the emphatically visible product. The Jack White piece de-emphasized the emphatically aural product that humans would normally focus on when observing an instrument. It instead emphasized construction and invention as human labors that lead to music. The form of our piece reveals the human labor of ‘doing a Hadouken’ by narrating and time stretching the sounds of button presses. At normal speed the process is negligible to the point of seeming hilarious and flailing. Slowed down, repeated, and narrated, the clicks reveal how mechanical the process is. This way, the process is deliciously more respectable and more perverse in its precise furtiveness.
It was also interesting to use audio alone to describe a process that typically would be better described with a visual. But somehow, if even for more comedic effect than practical, audio worked. Slowing down the audio once again also served some sort of purpose - it felt humorous, but it also maximized the use of audio in describing the process. Playing a slow-motion replay allowed the listener to make out the different clicks and button presses one more time. And finally, playing the same track over an actual example of the Hadouken move in action served as a punchline, so as to emphasize both the precision required to execute the move and the humour of the mini-process.
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