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"Cold War" is a percent for the arts project for a sports arena now under construction in south Florida, the new home for the NHL Panthers hockey team. Despite the fact that sporting events are media events broadcast live, the on-site spectacles still draw mass attendance. We're interested in the terms of the unwritten contract with this audience who have chosen to leave the comfort of home to participate in a mass spectacle. Assuming that the crowd attending a hockey game is one for which art is not a top priority, our strategy was to appropriate the focal point on which all eyes will converge: the ice, where a captive audience of 20,000 spectators is guaranteed. We intend to use the entire 85 foot wide by 200 foot long ice rink as a video projection screen and thwart the expectations of this audience perched to witness a sporting event.

We're currently working on a series of computer-animated videos which will interrogate hockey as part of the culture of conquest. Like many field sports and board games, hockey is played on an abstracted battlefield divided into rival territories, and is subject to highly developed codes of propriety and hostility like institutionalized warfare. This will be the largest video image ever produced. To do it, we're adapting video wall technologies with an array of projectors fed by multiple playback sources. The technology is intended to be entirely transparent, rendering only effect. Our system is patched into the broadcast control room to enable highlights from the game to be broadcast on to the ice between periods.

Sporting events continually break new ground for spectatorship. Hybrid events which intersect actual with media sites/situations abound, like sports bars, live boxing matches exclusively aired in clubs and theaters, tailgate parties around the televised event in the parking lot of the event, sports fans at live spectacles that split their attention between the field, Diamond Vision and their Watchmans... "Cold War" tries to complicate the surface of live action.

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