It would be easy, watching the muscular man roll around on a wrestling mat while video of his strange movements plays on the screen above him, to wonder what this has to do with voting.

It would be easy, watching the young woman on the opposite mat, eyes fixed on the screen, trying to make her video image grab his video image, to wonder how this fits into America’s democracy narrative.

It would be easy, listening to the artist who came up with this high-concept romp, to wonder how it will change anything.

It would be easy, in fact ridiculously easy, to dismiss the title of the effort that inspired it, “The Joy of Voting,” as a bitter oxymoron—this season more than ever.

But Megan Young is not making this easy. She is one of dozens of artists, activists, community organizers, and the like that have come together for the project to try to inspire the electorate—the engaged and the disengaged—to find greater vibrancy in the process. Young believes in what she’s doing, believes so ardently in the value of engagement that she only makes art that involves audience participation.

She runs barefoot into the middle of the wide-open, battered wood floor of this dimly lit theater in Akron, Ohio, where those two carefully placed mats, about 15 feet apart, are under the lenses of two surveillance cameras that simultaneously broadcast the participants’ movements so it looks like they are wrestling each other. A member of the theater staff, Kix Williams, squares up on the other mat and, with electronica playing in the background, they attempt to make their projected images grapple with one another.