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Local artist and musician Auchtorok was trying to think of a romantic installation he could do for Valentine’s Day.

He wanted it to involve a one-player video game where two players held hands and each did half of the work. It occurred to him — real name Jon Booth — that not only do most people know how to play Tetris but the game is actually romantic: “We’re just trying to fit things together.”

His creative process starts with considering what tools he can find. “I never think of the idea first because then it’s too hard to make things happen.” In this instance, the available tools included “capacitive” buttons, meaning “when you touch it, you close the circuit.” He painted two bar stools black and drilled a hole in each, and the control buttons he installed were “literally just the top of two bolts.”

Players had to put on a ring – “could’ve been anything, I just thought it was symbolic” – and then by touching the buttons while holding hands, the player on the left could move pieces left and right while the player on the right rotated them. “The idea was, they have to work together to make the line, and if they don’t hold hands the circuit doesn’t get closed.”

Booth has presented his collaborative Tetris installation twice in Ottawa, most recently this past Valentine’s Day at Wicked Wanda’s on Merivale and originally at Nature Nocturne at the Canadian Museum of Nature, where the game was projected high up in the rotunda, so everyone at the bar below could watch. “There was a line all night, so I’d say probably three or four hundred people played it.”

Most two-player teams at Nature Nocturne got three or four lines at most, Booth said, but one couple did so well he had to ask them to move on so others could take a turn. (Those excellent communicators, it turned out, were in an open relationship.) The worst job of the night went to a guy who was getting so frustrated with his non-gamer girlfriend that he tried to do both halves himself. (The crowd booed.)

Booth’s previous installations have also featured “the idea of taking old things that are familiar and finding a new way to either interact with them or play with them.” One that didn’t work as well as he’d hoped was a two-player competitive game of Snake, where players controlled their snake by balancing on a round tabletop with sensors built into each of the four directions. Unfortunately, one of the “controllers” broke, so the competitive element was lost.

He’s had some luck with Pacman, though. Another installation for Nature Nocturne involved “a contraption where you could play Pacman from the centre of the maze, so you’re standing in the little ghost house in the middle” while the game was projected from above. “So you had to look all around you and on the floor were the different buttons, kind of like a control pad, but you had to use your feet.”

The difference between seeing the game flat in front of you as a player and being immersed in it meant no one passed even the first map, Booth says, although one player came close. “Everyone thought it was going to be easy, and then they’d be looking behind them and their friends would be yelling ‘in front of you, he’s coming, he’s coming!’ People were getting super into it, because you’re really feeling surrounded. So I guess I really wanted to make people feel how terrified Pacman must feel every day of his life. He’s just hungry. He doesn’t know when he goes around the corner. You know, but he doesn’t.”

He tried a different but also chaotic Pacman-related idea for Don Kwan of Shanghai restaurant on Somerset, “but it was outdoors and it was raining so I think I had one person try it all night and packed it up after an hour.” For this one, he layered two active projections of Pacman on top of each other and then it was a race to see which player could clear their maze first. “But the problem is, since the two are totally lined up, you can’t tell which dots you’ve eaten and which dots they’ve eaten so you have to try and remember ‘where have I been.’” He says it was pretty fun, but not the kind of thing people are likely to get good at.

Since losing his job when Orange Art Gallery lost its space at City Centre, Booth has also been focusing more on his music, which he describes as ambient techno. He recently joined Broken Bottle Productions, a label / collective out of Portland, Oregon, and he’s been doing live sets on Fridays on his Youtube channel. Online viewers won’t see him performing, though. “I literally do not have any computer or device modern enough that could handle the load to do that.” Instead, viewers will see a 2- or 3-second clip from an old movie of a woman’s face looking a bit pensive or frustrated, which he converts to black-and-white and slow motion and then loops for his entire set.  “It almost looks still but it’s moving just a little bit. It’s just one face for each video. … It’s really not about watching, it’s about listening.”

His music is also available on his website and on Bandcamp, including “Somewhere Still, Part I,” which he says has been “getting a ridiculous amount of Shazams for a piece that is 45 minutes of ambient music,” and “Rituals,” which was the first track that got attention. “That really was very gratifying because for at least a couple years I thought nothing I did is as good as this. This was just like, I got it. Whatever it is I was looking to do, I did it.”

Auchtorok can be seen at upcoming music gigs in Ottawa, including DJing tonight at Ten Toes on Somerset, his new favourite coffee shop / bar / laundromat. He’ll also be performing his own music at Lounge 164 on March 6, and then DJing again at an art battle on March 9.

He has also applied to participate at the Mutek festival in Montreal this summer, for its 25th anniversary of celebrating electronic music and the digital arts. “I put in for music, but [when we attended last year] there’s projections everywhere, so I made sure in my proposal to put in that I do have visual effects I’d like to add.” His concept this time involves layering old clips of burlesque dancers, manipulated and offset by about half a second so that while the dancers move in slow motion it looks like there’s a red trail or shadow that follows behind them. He hasn’t heard back yet on his application but is hoping to be squeezed in somewhere in the huge, interactive experience that is Mutek. “If I could get in there, I would feel much more legitimate because going there was one of the coolest experiences I’ve ever had.”