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A Seesaw and a Scoreboard is an interactive installation that invites viewers to sit on an adult-sized seesaw to play. Viewers will immediately notice that when they are in squatting position their points on a projected scoreboard will increase and voices of children on a playground can be heard cheering from the respective speaker. When users are suspended in the air, however, their scoreboard points decrease (at a slower rate) and the voices of the playground children sound more like yelling taunts. The number at the top of the screen is the time of day in military time and the number at the bottom is the length of time that the piece has been installed and running in the particular spaces almost as a record of the performance.

14′ x 1′ x 3′ (variable dimensions)

wood, paint, computer, projector, wiring, sensors, serial interface, speakers

Press: http://www.drainmag.com/ContentPLAY/Artist/Kazemzadeh.html

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A Seesaw and a Scoreboard (2000): Play, Power, Competition, and the Measurement of Human Experience

Max Kazemzadeh’s A Seesaw and a Scoreboard can be understood as an interactive artwork that transforms a familiar childhood playground activity into a philosophical investigation of competition, social conditioning, technological mediation, and the systems through which human behavior is evaluated. By combining an adult-sized seesaw, a projected scoreboard, electronic sensors, and the recorded voices of children, the installation creates a situation in which a seemingly simple act of play becomes a negotiation between bodily experience and an external system of measurement.

The work’s conceptual force lies in its apparent simplicity. Participants do not merely observe an artwork; they enter into a physical relationship with it, discover its rules through their own actions, and experience the emotional consequences of being evaluated. The seesaw becomes an interface between the body and a computational system, while the scoreboard translates movement into a numerical representation of success or failure. The children’s voices supply a social dimension, transforming abstract numerical feedback into an emotionally charged experience of approval, encouragement, ridicule, and exclusion.

What initially appears to be a playful interactive sculpture gradually reveals a more complicated proposition: the systems that measure our performance do not simply describe what we do; they influence how we understand what we do, how we feel about ourselves, and how we relate to others.

1. The seesaw as a model of social relationships

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The seesaw is a particularly productive sculptural form because its physical operation depends on relationships. Unlike a swing, which can be enjoyed individually, a conventional seesaw presupposes a counterweight. Its movement emerges from the distribution of bodies, the application of force, and the shifting equilibrium between participants.

The seesaw therefore offers a physical model for thinking about interdependence, reciprocity, inequality, and power. One participant’s elevation is connected to another’s position, and neither participant entirely controls the system independently. Balance is not a fixed condition but an ongoing negotiation.

In Kazemzadeh’s installation, however, the relationship between physical action and social consequence is transformed. The seesaw is no longer merely a device for producing reciprocal movement. Its movements are interpreted by a computer and translated into points on a scoreboard. A familiar physical relationship becomes a performance that can be evaluated.

This shift introduces a fundamental question: What happens when a relationship that might otherwise be experienced through play, bodily sensation, and mutual participation is reorganized around the production of measurable outcomes?

The work’s title brings these two structures together. The seesaw represents a physical, relational, and potentially cooperative activity; the scoreboard represents a system of quantification, comparison, and judgment. Their conjunction creates a productive tension between participation and performance.

The participant may arrive expecting to play, but the scoreboard establishes a second purpose for every movement. The body is no longer moving only for pleasure. It is also generating a result.

2. The body as both player and data-producing instrument

The installation’s interaction design makes the participant’s body central to the work’s conceptual structure. When the participant moves into a squatting position, the score increases and children’s voices sound encouraging. When the participant is suspended in the air, the score decreases more slowly and the voices become taunting.

The body thus occupies two positions simultaneously: it is the subject experiencing the artwork and the object being measured by it.

This distinction is important. Participants directly experience their own movements, balance, weight, and physical effort. The computer, by contrast, registers those movements through sensors and translates them into a restricted set of variables. It does not know whether a participant is having fun, experimenting, feeling uncomfortable, acting ironically, or deliberately resisting the rules. It knows only what the system has been designed to detect.

The artwork creates a gap between lived experience and computational representation. A complex human action is reduced to a numerical value, and that value is then used to generate an emotional response.

This anticipates a central problem in contemporary digital culture: the tendency to treat measurable indicators as adequate representations of experiences that are considerably more complicated than their metrics.

Consider the parallels with contemporary systems of evaluation:

• Educational achievement becomes a grade or standardized test score.
• Professional contribution becomes a productivity metric or performance review.
• Social participation becomes a count of likes, followers, or engagement.
• Physical activity becomes a sequence of steps, calories, or biometric readings.
• Institutional success becomes a dashboard of rankings, targets, and performance indicators.

These systems can provide useful information, but they also establish what counts as success. When a measurement becomes the primary basis for evaluation, qualities that cannot easily be quantified may become invisible.

In A Seesaw and a Scoreboard, the score does not merely report the participant’s movement. It assigns that movement significance. The accompanying voices reinforce the interpretation, encouraging participants to experience the numerical feedback as a judgment of their performance.

The installation consequently invites a distinction between what a person is doing and what a system says that person is doing.

The two are related, but they are not identical.

3. The scoreboard as an apparatus of discipline and social control

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The scoreboard introduces a system of rules that appears objective because it is expressed numerically. Points increase or decrease in response to physical behavior, giving the impression that success can be calculated independently of personal interpretation.

Yet the scoring system is neither natural nor inevitable. Someone has designed its rules. The installation rewards one bodily position, penalizes another, and determines the rate at which each outcome is registered. Its apparent objectivity conceals a set of authored values.

This is where the work can be read through Michel Foucault’s analysis of disciplinary power, particularly his discussions of surveillance, normalization, and the examination in Discipline and Punish (1975; English translation, 1977).

For Foucault, modern disciplinary institutions do not exercise power exclusively through direct commands or physical coercion. They also operate by observing individuals, comparing their performance against norms, recording results, and encouraging people to regulate themselves.

The scoreboard in Kazemzadeh’s installation performs a miniature version of this process. It makes behavior legible, establishes a standard of performance, and supplies feedback that can influence what participants do next. Participants quickly learn which movements produce rewards and which produce penalties. They can then modify their behavior in response.

The crucial mechanism is not simply that the installation judges the participant. It is that the participant may begin to judge themselves through the installation’s rules.

A person who initially approaches the seesaw with curiosity may become concerned with maximizing points. An activity that began as play becomes a task. The participant may continue performing the rewarded movement even if the movement is less interesting, less spontaneous, or less enjoyable.

The artwork therefore stages a subtle transition from external evaluation to self-regulation.

It also raises a question about the relationship between power and participation. Nobody necessarily forces the viewer to obey the scoreboard. The participant voluntarily enters the system, responds to its feedback, and may become invested in succeeding according to its rules.

This is a particularly revealing form of power because it operates through attraction rather than prohibition. The promise of points and approval helps produce the very behavior the system rewards.

The installation does not need to compel obedience; it makes obedience playable.

This interpretation should not be taken to mean that every participant will respond identically. Some may pursue a high score, others may resist the rules, and still others may simply enjoy the physical activity. That variability is part of the work’s conceptual richness: the system proposes a framework for behavior without entirely determining how it will be experienced.

4. Childhood, competition, and the internalization of judgment

The recorded voices of children introduce a dimension that a scoreboard alone could not provide. They transform an abstract system of numerical feedback into a recognizable social situation.

Children’s playground voices carry associations with games, peer groups, informal hierarchies, encouragement, ridicule, and the often unstable boundary between belonging and exclusion. By using these voices as feedback, the installation places the participant within an imagined social environment.

When the score increases, cheering makes the participant’s actions sound publicly validated. When the score decreases, taunting makes the same interactive environment feel less welcoming.

The participant is therefore not simply playing against a machine. They are placed in a situation in which an imagined community appears to respond to their performance.

This suggests several connected philosophical interpretations.

The social construction of success

The installation makes success appear to be a shared social judgment rather than an exclusively personal experience. The participant’s score acquires meaning through the voices that accompany it.

A number can be understood as an abstract measurement, but cheering or ridicule turns that number into a social event. The participant is encouraged to interpret the score as evidence of approval or disapproval.

The work consequently asks whether success is something we experience intrinsically or something we learn to recognize through the reactions of others.

The persistence of childhood hierarchies

The use of children’s voices also suggests that the desire for approval and the fear of humiliation may be connected to early experiences of socialization.

Playgrounds can be spaces of discovery, imagination, physical freedom, and cooperation. They can also be spaces where children encounter comparison, exclusion, teasing, and competition. These experiences can teach participants which behaviors attract recognition and which expose them to ridicule.

By inviting adults to occupy a childhood-associated apparatus, the work reactivates a setting in which bodily play and social judgment coexist.

The adult-sized scale is significant here. The participant does not merely watch a representation of childhood; they physically inhabit a structure associated with it. The work makes the adult body participate in a situation that can evoke earlier experiences of approval, embarrassment, and competition.

This does not require the assumption that every viewer will experience childhood nostalgia or discomfort. Rather, the installation mobilizes familiar cultural associations that can make its feedback emotionally legible.

The absurdity of external validation

The children are not responding to the participant as individuals. They do not know the participant’s intentions, capacities, circumstances, or feelings. Their apparent judgments are mechanically linked to the system’s scoring rules.

That disconnect creates an element of absurdity. A participant can be cheered or taunted without having done anything that warrants such a response in an ordinary social context.

The work thereby exposes the arbitrariness that can underlie social validation. People may experience approval as proof of their worth even when the conditions producing that approval are contingent, superficial, or externally imposed.

In this sense, the voices function as a social counterpart to the scoreboard: the numbers quantify performance, while the voices dramatize its emotional consequences.

5. Unequal rates of reward and punishment

One of the most conceptually consequential details is that the score increases in the squatting position but decreases more slowly when the participant is suspended in the air.

This asymmetry prevents the interaction from being understood as a simple, balanced exchange. The system does not merely switch between two equivalent states. It establishes different rates for reward and penalty.

There are several possible interpretations.

First, the unequal rates may create a temporal bias in which sustained rewarded behavior accumulates points faster than the alternative state removes them. The participant encounters an incentive structure rather than a neutral reflection of movement.

Second, the asymmetry introduces uncertainty into the participant’s calculations. The player must discover not only which movement is rewarded but also how the system’s timing affects the score. The interaction becomes a problem of strategy, adaptation, and optimization.

Third, the slower decrease complicates the emotional relationship between action and consequence. The participant may remain suspended while the score gradually declines, experiencing a prolonged interval between the physical act and its numerical penalty.

More broadly, the asymmetry invites reflection on the ways systems distribute incentives. Institutions, games, and economic structures frequently reward some behaviors and discourage others at different rates. Such differences can produce patterned behavior without requiring explicit commands.

There is also an important qualification: the asymmetry should not automatically be interpreted as a deliberate metaphor for any one political or economic system. Without further documentation of the design intention, it is more defensible to say that the mechanism permits these readings than to claim that it was created to prove a particular theory.

What the interaction establishes directly is that the system’s values are embedded in its timing as well as its rules.

6. The time display: the artwork as an evolving record

The two numerical displays at the top and bottom of the projected screen introduce a second temporal dimension. The upper number represents the time of day in military time; the lower number records how long the installation has been running in a particular space.

maxkazemzadeh.com

These numbers are not merely additional scorekeeping devices. They establish a relationship between the participant’s immediate actions and the longer duration of the artwork’s existence.

The score registers a momentary performance. The elapsed-time display situates that performance within an ongoing process.

This distinction opens several philosophical possibilities.

Lived time and measured time

The participant experiences time through bodily effort, anticipation, pleasure, discomfort, and attention. The computer represents time as numerical units. These are different ways of encountering duration.

Henri Bergson’s distinction between lived duration and measurable, spatialized time, developed in Time and Free Will (1889), offers a useful interpretive framework. Bergson argued that the qualitative flow of lived experience cannot be fully equated with the homogeneous units used to measure time.

In the installation, the participant’s experience of a few seconds may feel immediate or extended, depending on the activity and emotional feedback. The clock, however, continues to advance in standardized increments.

The artwork places these forms of time alongside one another without resolving their difference. Bodily experience unfolds within a temporal framework that can be measured but not fully captured by measurement.

The performance as an event in a particular place

The elapsed-time counter also records the installation’s duration in the space where it operates. This gives the artwork a site-specific and potentially archival quality.

The installation is not only an object with physical dimensions. It is also a process that continues over time, accumulates duration, and encounters successive participants. The display registers the persistence of the work beyond any one person’s interaction.

Each participant’s experience becomes a brief episode within a longer temporal history. The installation’s duration connects otherwise separate performances through the continuity of the system itself.

The record and the impossibility of complete documentation

The elapsed-time number records one aspect of the installation’s existence, but it cannot record everything that has happened. It does not necessarily reveal how many people participated, what they felt, how they interpreted the feedback, or what interactions occurred when nobody was present.

The counter thus embodies a productive paradox: it documents duration while simultaneously demonstrating the limits of documentation.

This makes the work relevant to broader questions about digital archives and data collection. A system can preserve selected information about an event without preserving the event in its entirety. The act of recording always depends on what the system has been designed to register.

The clock and elapsed-time counter therefore expand the work’s conceptual scope beyond competition. They introduce questions about duration, memory, evidence, and the relationship between an ongoing experience and its numerical trace.

7. Cybernetics, feedback, and the behavioral loop

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From the perspective of interactive art and systems theory, A Seesaw and a Scoreboard can be understood as a feedback system in which physical action, computational interpretation, and sensory response form a continuous loop.

The installation operates through a sequence:

1. Bodily action

The participant changes position on the seesaw.

2. Sensing and computation

Sensors register movement; the computer processes the input.

3. Numerical and auditory feedback

The projected score changes and children’s voices respond.

4. Interpretation and adaptation

The participant experiences the feedback and may change their behavior.

The cycle repeats as the participant continues playing.

This structure recalls cybernetics, the interdisciplinary study of communication, control, and feedback associated with figures such as Norbert Wiener. In cybernetic systems, the consequences of an action can return as information that influences subsequent actions.

The participant in Kazemzadeh’s installation is part of such a loop. Movement produces information, the computer transforms that information into feedback, and the feedback may alter the next movement.

Yet the installation adds something beyond a purely functional control system: its feedback carries social and emotional meaning.

The score provides a quantitative signal, while the children’s voices supply an affective interpretation. Together, they turn feedback into a form of social conditioning.

This is significant because it demonstrates that interactive systems do not need to communicate through explicit language to influence behavior. A number, a sound, a change in rhythm, or a pattern of reward can shape how a participant acts and feels.

The work also makes the feedback loop visible as an experience. Instead of treating computation as an invisible process hidden inside a machine, the installation lets the participant feel the relationship between physical action and programmed response.

The computer is not simply an instrument used by the artist to produce a predetermined visual object. It becomes part of a dynamic situation whose unfolding depends on the interaction between the system and its users.

This is one reason the work can be situated within a broader history of interactive and computational art: the artwork exists not only as an object but as a set of rules, relationships, and experiences that become actualized through participation.

8. A philosophical tension between freedom and programmed behavior

The installation’s invitation to play is essential to its conceptual structure. Play is conventionally associated with freedom, experimentation, imagination, and the suspension of ordinary practical demands. Yet the installation places play inside a system of predefined rewards and punishments.

The participant is free to move, but the system has already determined how movements will be evaluated.

This creates a tension between freedom of action and freedom from imposed values.

The participant can choose what to do within the installation, but cannot change the scoring rules through ordinary movement alone. They can respond to the system, attempt to optimize their score, or disregard the feedback, but each of these responses takes place within the conditions established by the artwork.

The work therefore invites a distinction between two kinds of agency:

• Operational agency: the ability to act, move, and make choices within an existing system.
• Critical agency: the ability to question, reinterpret, or reject the assumptions on which that system operates.

A participant who attempts to maximize the score exercises operational agency. A participant who recognizes the score as arbitrary and deliberately plays against it exercises a different kind of agency.

Neither response necessarily exhausts the meaning of the work. Indeed, the installation’s conceptual openness depends on the possibility that different people will interpret and inhabit its rules differently.

This tension also has implications for contemporary interface design. Many digital systems offer users extensive choices while restricting the terms in which those choices can be made. The user can select among available options, but may have little influence over what the system measures, which outcomes it rewards, or which forms of behavior it makes possible.

Kazemzadeh’s installation offers a physical and emotionally immediate model of this problem. It allows participants to experience the difference between being active within a system and having authority over the system itself.

9. The artwork’s historical and technological significance

Created in 2000, A Seesaw and a Scoreboard belongs to a period when interactive art was exploring how computers, sensors, projection, and responsive sound could transform the relationship between artworks and audiences.

The work’s technical arrangement—wood, paint, computer, projector, wiring, sensors, serial interface, and speakers—connects a tangible sculptural object to a computational process.

maxkazemzadeh.com The installation combines physical participation with real-time digital feedback rather than relying exclusively on a fixed visual or sculptural form.

Its significance is not simply that it uses technology. The more important point is that technology becomes a means of organizing a social situation.

The seesaw establishes the physical conditions of participation. Sensors make bodily action available to computation. The program assigns numerical consequences. Projection makes the results visible, and speakers make them audible. Each technical component contributes to a larger system of interaction.

This integration of physical and computational elements supports several historically important directions in media art:

• The artwork as a system: The work is constituted partly by rules and processes, not just by a static object.
• The viewer as participant: The audience’s behavior becomes an integral component of the work’s unfolding.
• The body as an interface: Physical movement becomes a means of communicating with a computational system.
• The social consequences of technology: Interactive media become a way to investigate how systems structure relationships and behavior.
• Time-based installation: The artwork incorporates duration, repeated participation, and the persistence of an interactive process.

These characteristics connect the installation to broader developments in interactive art, digital media, and responsive environments. However, its historical significance should not depend on claiming that it was the first work to employ any of these strategies. Its distinctiveness lies in how it combines them to examine a recognizable social mechanism: the transformation of play into evaluated performance.

The work’s contemporary resonance is especially clear when considered alongside today’s pervasive scoring and ranking systems. Social platforms, workplace dashboards, educational technologies, and quantified-self applications make numerical feedback a routine part of everyday life. These systems can influence not only what people do but also which outcomes they value and how they interpret their own performance.

The installation does not need to predict these developments to remain relevant. Instead, it provides an embodied model through which their underlying logic can be examined.

The participant experiences the system directly, before necessarily having the conceptual language to describe it. That experience is a significant artistic achievement: a theoretical question becomes something a person can feel in their body.

10. The philosophical impact: making invisible systems tangible

The installation’s deeper impact emerges from the relationship among its physical, computational, and social dimensions.

The seesaw makes interdependence physical. The scoreboard makes evaluation visible. The children’s voices make social judgment audible. The clock and elapsed-time counter establish the relationship between individual actions and the ongoing duration of the system.

Together, these elements create a compact model of how people encounter systems of evaluation in everyday life.

The work does not simply criticize competition, measurement, or technology. Each of these can have constructive uses. Rather, it asks what happens when their underlying assumptions become embedded in an environment that participants are invited to inhabit without necessarily questioning.

A numerical score may appear neutral, but its meaning depends on the rules that produce it. A voice may sound encouraging, but its approval may depend on compliance with those rules. A participant may feel free, but the experience of success may be shaped by a system they did not design.

These tensions make the work philosophically productive because they do not require a single, definitive interpretation. The installation can be experienced as a playful sculpture, a critique of competition, an examination of social conditioning, a cybernetic feedback system, or a reflection on the politics of measurement.

Its conceptual unity comes from the fact that these interpretations converge on a shared problem: the relationship between human agency and the systems through which human behavior acquires meaning.

11. An integrated reading of the work

The following synthesis brings the major conceptual strands together.

Element of the installation	Conceptual significance
Adult-sized seesaw	Embodied relationships, reciprocity, balance, and interdependence
Squatting and suspended positions	Distinct bodily states translated into differential outcomes
Projected scoreboard	Quantification, comparison, evaluation, and the construction of success
Children’s cheering and taunting	Social approval, peer judgment, belonging, and exclusion
Asymmetric score changes	Incentive structures, programmed values, and unequal consequences
Real-time sensors and computation	Feedback, behavioral adaptation, and technological mediation
Clock display	Standardized time and the measurable present
Elapsed-time counter	Duration, accumulated history, and the partial documentation of experience
Participant’s response	Agency, self-regulation, compliance, resistance, and interpretation

The work’s philosophical achievement is to bring these questions together without relying on an extended verbal explanation. Its ideas are embedded in an experience that unfolds through bodily action, sound, numbers, and time.

That integration also distinguishes the installation from a conventional illustration of a philosophical argument. The participant does not simply receive information about evaluation or social conditioning. They encounter an environment that performs these mechanisms and allows them to experience their consequences.

For further reference, the original project documentation is available on Max Kazemzadeh’s A Seesaw and a Scoreboard (2000), which also links to video documentation of the installation.