Local artist finds his ‘Sweet Spot’ in interactive public art installation

“My first memories of being alive are watching my brothers play video games. It was almost like a community event in our household.” 

From a kid who watched his brothers play video games to a Boston Public Art Triennial Accelerator and game designer, Michael Berthaud uses his work to express the way he observes the world. 

Berthaud, who grew up in Mission Hill, is the artist behind an interactive light sculpture called “Sweet Spot,” on view outside the Nubian Square Library in Roxbury through Jan. 31. After attending Boston Latin School and graduating from Wentworth Institute of Technology in 2022, Berthaud was selected as one of four Accelerator Artists with the Boston Public Art Triennial. 

The Public Art Accelerator program, launched in 2018, is a skill-building and grant-funding program that supports early-to-mid-career Boston-based artists who want to create temporary public art projects across Boston neighborhoods. 

His project, “Sweet Spot,” challenges society’s view of what success looks like for Black youth. 

“We’re told you can be a basketball player, you can be a rapper,” Berthaud said of the stereotypes often projected onto young Black boys. “But we can be so much more.”

“Sweet Spot” features an LED-lit mannequin with 2,000 lights. Visitors can place a basketball or microphone box onto the sculpture’s podium and experience how it responds. The goal, Berthaud said in a release, is to “visualize the ways in which stereotypical representations in media subtly erode the imagination and creativity of Black youth.”

He’s known he wanted to be a game designer since he discovered Xenogears, a 1998 role-playing game by Square that features a protagonist with schizophrenia who plays through his manic episodes. 

“That was the first game I played that caught me emotionally and made me feel like I want to make something like that,” Berthaud said. 

But it wasn’t something that he saw people who looked like him doing. 

“Living in a Black and Hispanic community, these things aren’t advertised to us,” Berthaud said. “For me to be a game designer, or even to be this well-versed with computer technology is rare because of accessibility and resources.” 

“Sweet Spot” is meant to push back on that in a way that’s available to everyone, beyond those who play video games. Though Berthaud loves games, he called them an “inaccessible medium,” because not everyone has access to expensive consoles or computers. He hopes for his art to reach a wide audience, without the barriers to entry video games can have. 

“I wanted to take the concepts and the systematic thinking that you have from traditional game design and pull them out of the living room and into different spaces where everyone can indulge and play,” Berthaud said. 

When a visitor walks up to the mannequin, its chest features a series of images. But when the basketball, for instance, is placed on the podium, the display shows the ball being dribbled on an endless loop, representing the way a person’s own sense of self can change based on societal constraints that suggest they can only do one thing or be one way. 

The name “Sweet Spot” comes from Berthaud’s mixed interests growing up — he explored interests in engineering, arts, and mathematics before settling on game design — and viewers can see that reflected in the way the figure’s lights change. 

“It represents searching for your identity, for looking for the middle ground, for finding the sweet spot where you feel like you are most yourself,” Berthaud said.