NEW YORK -- The alleged Maryland snipers may be behind bars, but New Yorkers can experience the thrill of shooting innocent people for themselves, sniper style, with a controversial, new interactive art installation on display in SoHo.

Shoot Me, by the multimedia artist Miyoung Song, features a basement shooting gallery that enables visitors to take potshots with a BB gun at random women, children and porn stars in the throes of sex as they flash by on a video screen equipped with a paper bull's eye.

The installation has been attacked by newspapers and local TV stations for its insensitive timing, while the national capital region was living in fear of random sniper attacks. The Daily News criticized its, "sophomoric imbecility."

Shoot Me, which is part of a group show titled Pulse that features works by 11 South Korean-born artists, opened at the Puffin Room on Broome Street in September, before the wave of violence around Washington. It closes Nov. 10.

Artist Miyoung Song says that the controversy is manufactured. "I think the media wants to extend the sniper issue with this."

Song, 35, said she intended the work as a critique of a male-dominated society and an exploration of the violent impulses of the unconscious.

She was inspired by watching little girls in her native South Korea pose for their fathers to take their photos, while calling out, "Shoot me, Daddy! Shoot me!" Song wanted to play with the different definitions of the phrase, including its use in the world of pornography as an incitement to orgasm.

Song's installation includes a video of comments from people who have used the shooting gallery. "It was fun," says a 14-year-old boy. "I liked shooting the little kids." The boy's father says: "It was very satisfying. I think there should be more of this . . . You want to go back on to the streets and find some new targets."

The comments were recorded last year, but at least one prefigures the sniper attacks. "It made me think that just anybody could be a target," says Mikie, a 29-year-old Web programmer. "Somebody could be shooting at me from somewhere."

He added: "It also made me think about advertising, about how people make me into a target." In fact, visitors to the gallery can purchase black t-shirts adorned with a silver bullseye on the chest. "Be a human target," says an ad for the shirts.

Carl Rosenstein, the director of the Puffin Room, says the attention to the piece suggests a fickleness on the part of the media. "I think it's tragic and telling that the media is only interested in stories about gun violence when people are killed, as they were in Washington, and the issue is hunted off to the side at other times." But Song says she didn't intend the piece to be a comment on gun control. "Violence didn't come because of guns. People's unconsciousness can be a real terror, and all of the violence and terror exist in society. Terrorism existed a long time ago, and if guns didn't exist, people would use spears or baseball bats."

Song says she has no intention of taking down the work, but the for-profit American entertainment industry reacted with extreme sensitivity during the sniper rampage. Twentieth Century Fox pulled the intended Nov. 15 release of Phone Booth, a thriller about a sniper in New York who targets a man in a phone booth. A division of Fox also pulled online advertisements for the television drama 24 which featured the crosshairs of a rifle, after complaints from Internet users.