Perfect Dark, 2001
4.5 minutes

“Perfect Dark” is a portrait of a 13-year-old boy playing a video game.  Presented as a split screen, the left-side shows a close-up of the boy’s face, utterly still and emotionless, as he plays the game; the right-side of the screen shows the game he is playing.

America’s Army, 2003
8 minutes

In 1999 the U.S. Army's Office of Economic & Manpower Analysis, decided to make as a recruitment tool-- www.americasarmy.com --an internet-based interactive game targeted towards teenage boys.  In this video, Max at 15 year old is shown playing the game, going through basic training then into the battle scene.  Its final shot shows Max’s character dead on the battlefield.

In Happy Birthday, Max celebrates his 15th birthday by consuming a Carvel ice cream photo-cake with an image of his own face imprinted on the frosting.  Edited in the style of a music video to a techno-remix of the tune Happy Birthday to You, Max is seen alternatively eating, playing with and finally destroying the cake,  Jackson Pollock-style.

Slow Dance, 2003
4.5 minutes

Footage from Max’s actual 15th Birthday Party—staged, as a public performance at Participant, Inc. in NYC—is recycled into a music video about alienation to the tunes of Radiohead.  At the original party,  DJ Paul Klay accompanied by a VJ,  combined music with a light show,  projecting videos including previous ones made by the artist starring Max,  onto all four walls of the exhibition space.

War Dance, 2005
3-screen video-projection

Footage of three boys, shirtless and banging each other, at Max’s 16th birthday are juxtaposed with videotape of Max and his friends, reenacting the Abu Ghraib photographs.  In both sequences, the boys are sexual, aggressive and also playful, forcing the audience to try to make distinctions between acceptable and unacceptable behavior in young men.  This video installation also obviously plays on the fears of many Americans, that recruits not much older than the kids on view are being placed in awful situations and forced to make difficult choices.  This theme is underscored by the soundtrack, an anti war song by the band “system of the down.”  However, the faux masculinity/violence of punk rock is also investigated in this work where the dancers are old enough to enjoy their enactment of adult-dance behavior, but seem too young to be playing heroin-addict chic.  Military or mosh pit?  Recruits or rock-and-roll?  Both options raise fears in the eyes of adults observing the behavior from a distance.