Deep Play is a 2007 twelve-screen video installation by German filmmaker and artist Harun Farocki. It uses footage and data from the 2006 FIFA World Cup final between France and Italy. The synchronized screens show the television broadcast alongside other views of the match, computer reconstructions and statistical analysis. It was first presented at documenta 12 in Kassel in 2007.
Description The twelve channels each run for two hours and fifteen minutes and are shown in a loop. One source is the international television feed of the final. Others follow individual players and the coaches, show the area around Berlin's Olympic Stadium, or turn the game into diagrams and three-dimensional computer models. Statistical displays record information such as player movement, speed and possession.
The sound also comes from several sources. The television footage includes instructions from the broadcast director, while another part of the installation uses German police radio recorded during the match. Film scholar Hyeonseok Seo notes that most of the images were found footage, apart from material shot by Farocki and his team around the stadium.
Farocki said that he took the title from Clifford Geertz's writing on Balinese cockfighting, which he read while working on the installation. He considered using the German title of Geertz's book, Dichte Beschreibung ("thick description"), but felt that it would imply an interpretation of the material that he did not want to prescribe.
Exhibitions Deep Play was first shown at documenta 12, where it occupied the entrance rotunda of the Fridericianum. A presentation at Greene Naftali in New York ran from January to February 2008.
The Northern Gallery for Contemporary Art in Sunderland showed the installation as part of AV Festival 08. The festival billed it as the work's UK premiere. It was also included in Re-enactments in Montreal and Machines & Souls: Digital Art and New Media at the Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofía in Madrid.
A 2017 presentation at LiFE in Saint-Nazaire used a version of Deep Play from the collection of the Centre national des arts plastiques.
Reception Reviewing documenta 12 for KUNSTFORUM International, Susanne Boecker focused on the difference between the familiar television broadcast and the material normally hidden behind it. She described the football match as a way of showing the contemporary production and presentation of moving images.
Alan Gilbert, reviewing the New York exhibition for The Village Voice, placed Deep Play within Farocki's interest in showing how media work. Gilbert noted that despite the amount of visual and statistical information in the installation, the technology could not explain Zinedine Zidane's headbutt during the final or the reactions that viewers brought to the match.
Sabine Niederer and Raymond Taudin Chabot discussed Deep Play as an example of a quantified event, in which the television image is shown alongside data measuring and reconstructing the same game. Seo concentrated on the systems behind the images, describing the installation in terms of the digital apparatus used to record, analyse, broadcast and reconfigure the event.
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