Deep Play, Yazzy's at www.williamverdult.com

Sam Pulitzer/Greene Naftali - Harun Farocki’s “Deep Play,” a video installation at Greene Naftali, shows images from the 2006 World Cup final on gallery walls.

According to the New York Times “Deep Play” (2007), by the German filmmaker Harun Farocki, appeared at a disadvantage in this summer’s Documenta XII. A 12-channel video installation documenting the 2006 World Cup final in Berlin, it was presented on a dozen smallish monitors lined up side by side, making it impossible to take in more than a portion at a time of an elaborately fragmented and interlocked piece.

Greene Naftali solves the problem by projecting the images large on three gallery walls, creating the immersive media bath the artist surely had in mind, an environment as absorbing as it is bewildering. Most films and installations work to focus your attention. Mr. Farocki’s give you no rest. “Deep Play” presents the soccer match between France and Italy at a real-time length of 2 hours 15 minutes, but from a dozen different perspectives and in several technological modes simultaneously.

Separate screens are devoted to the French and Italian players, others to the coaches, still others to digital simulations and statistical analyses of the game in progress. An international spectacle, seen by a television audience of more than a billion people, is sliced into a data-rich but inorganic patchwork of controlled information, a contemporary version of what was once known as God’s-eye omniscience and is now called surveillance.

But in seeing more, Mr. Farocki seems to ask, are we seeing better, or are we missing the real picture, the actual event? What if the subject of “Deep Play” were a war rather than a sports match? (In a sense it is.) What would give us the truer impression: a montage of television newscasts and Internet images — entrancement through distraction — or a single camera trained unblinkingly on the field? We may never know