Symphony of a Missing Room (Lundahl & Seitl):

Symphony was, in the simplest terms, the augmentation of the Birmingham Museum and Gallery with sound and light*. An experience begun and ended as a group, but that very quickly evaporates into a binaural audio wandering-for-one (extremely effective in the acoustic environment of a museum); then vanishes into bright blindness as goggles – through which you can only really distinguish shifts in the light – obscure your vision. You are guided on journey by a voice, and by the touch and brush of warm hands.

Symphony reminded me of the best of my childhood dreams, always about behind, under, through. I had this particular dream (I tried to write the book of it aged 9, it had an illustration, and everything) that on a certain night, running in the dark through the big creaky barn-house that was where I grew up, I would take the stairs, but it would be a set I had never walked down before; a set of stairs that took me to another time, or another place. Symphony was like that feeling, like striking across a playing field with dusty knees and stripy dress in summer, but also knowing, knowing, it was a spindly bridge across the fiery lava pits guarding some treasure.

The piece played with your trust, but pleasurably so, the guide was both reliable and flighty; easily scared off, but as you moved – guided by the touches of numerous hands – you never felt lost.

It began curiously, with slowings-down, reveals, and the constant question ‘is this a part of it?’ – it was in this very beginning question that I felt the piece was its strongest, it’s most taught. The blind wanderings through the secret door (to find the missing room) were almost magical (though left to go on a little too long), and at the last you are left lying on a piece of carpet, as regular museum-goers walk quizzically around you – feeling how I always imagined the humans in a Midsummer’s Night’s Dream feel as they wake up; back in the real world, with a sensation of having tripped across worlds, but never having left that spot.

Unfortunately the main voice grated a little for me (kind of like a fairy that you want to swat). I’d have also like to have seen it play a little more with physical sensations, of rushing air, water, or the smell of tree bark, and to weave in the male voices a little more sense-fully. But these are minor, and probably quite personal gripes. Mostly it was transporting, mostly I felt like I was in a secret room hung with cobwebs and adventure, mostly it was a journey that didn’t fill you in as a character, or part of a narrative, but that asked quiet questions about perception, buildings, and the spaces we travel between life and art. A fracture of a fairy tale, that you slip through for a moment.

*Who says ‘in the simplest terms’ and uses words like ‘augmentation’? I do, apparently.

Narrating our lines (plan b):

This piece caught me in a very different way. It was a much simpler presentation-style piece by Daniel Belasco Rogers and Sophia New, who have for years been using gps units to track their every movement across their neighbourhood, home city of Berlin, and the wider world. They have also (head up hyperlocal) been completing a similar experiment with the residents of Birmingham; anyone has been able (and still can, I think) pick up a gps unit from MAC and become a part of the trace-map of the city.

Daniel and Sophia drew some lovely gentle links; mentioning the research that shows the growth of the hippocampus (navigation centre**) in the brains of London cabbies – ‘we write cities into our bodies’ – as well as touching on the idea of ‘sousveillance’. They traced their journeys using text messages, ‘mood reports’, and watched a map of the walkers of Birmingham eked out, telling us who they could see, the story, the person behind certain lines.

However what grabbed me most about the piece, was their pulling a quote from De Certeau (slightly longer here)

“The ordinary practitioners of the city live “down below,” below the thresholds at which visibility begins. They walk — an elementary form of this experience of the city; they are walkers, Wandersmanner, whose bodies follow the thicks and thins of an urban “text” they write without being able to read it..”

They used this to say that gps now allows us to read our urban texts. I understand what they’re saying (and this is a molehill out of a minor flourish) but I don’t agree with this. From the most mundane point of view, the fact that we see the gps product emerge after the act of walking still makes it an illegible practice, like writing in the dark. People still write without being able to read it; reading occurs after the phrase is written. More philosophically (?) speaking, how is that line the writ of our paths? Is our walking made up only of the track our route takes, its speed, frequency, where we were travelling from, where we’re moving to, and why those things are happening?

There is a section from a Kafka piece that Deleuze and Guattari are mad on in Towards a Minor Literature where they talk about the special form of punishment given in a certain culture. In that culture, a criminal is not told of what they are convicted, rather they have it inscribed in a language on their body, in their flesh. And yet no one can read this language, only the person on whom the punishment is being inflicted***.

There is something, there, I think, about the illegibility of human experience. For all that we can read about how we move through the world, the traces we leave tell us as much about our experience, as the letters L O V E do about the feeling.

Indeed, I think separating the above quote from the second half of the passage, does the sentiment a disservice, it continues;

“These practitioners make use of spaces that cannot be seen; their knowledge of them is as blind as that of lovers in each other’s arms. The paths that correspond in this intertwining, unrecognized poems in which each body is an element signed by many others, elude legibility”

That moment, when you breathe in the smell of another person’s skin and every note of that moment is colour and breath and soap, shampoo, smoke, and the whispered settling of the air around you. The closest I know of blindness, and of all encompassing vision. A picture of that scene is what plan b showed me, and it was a very well framed one. But I don’t think they were urban texts as de Certeau meant them. Impossible – but I would like to see how you might push what is currently just data as close as you can to that point.

** generalising, follow the link for the Real Science

*** that puts me in mind of this freakangels bit

Fierce is on until Sunday, with lots of free encounters as well as paying bits. Do, if you can, get to see some of it.

The title’s a Pratchett joke. It’s the name of the mountain where all the gods hang out in his sort-of-comedy-fantasy Discworld. Not that I’m casting myself as a god in this reference, you understand. More I needed a title, and this kind of worked, whilst hopefully making those of you out there of equal dork status feel a warm ‘one-of-us’ glow in your collective bellies. Mmm. Glowy.

Manifest(o)in’ am I? Well, yes, collectively, with that there Nikki Pugh (and provoked by Paul Conneally); who I had the great pleasure to finally meet in the flesh last Tuesday. I’m rushing around like a very busy person at the moment – heading off to Belfast this weekend is knocking out a lot of my ‘doing stuff’ time – so I haven’t had time to talk about the Fierce evening of testing new work/ideas that I attended. It was really brilliant, though; I particularly spent the night with a vibrating gps creature, you can read more on that here. Anyway, as Nikki highlights over on her blog post, we were both struck, whilst being in each other’s physical presence, how lonely our practice can sometimes make us feel. Naturally our response was to write a SPLACIST/TECHNOSPLACIST MANIFESTO over googledocs a couple of nights later. Now all we need is to pretend that the next big revolution is all our doing, spend the rest of our days spilling wine over our faces, and we’ll already have outdone the Situationists by dint of actually having done some stuff.*   **

Anyway, head on over to Nikki’s piece and read her context to the manifesto. Or look a whole paragraph down to read the thing itself. Also: JOIN US.

In other news, you can see my face on this website, and I’ve been reading Eats, Shoots and Leaves in a vain effort to, as my supervisor put it, ‘learn how to punctuate’. Look! I put semi colons in this! I’ve moved into the over-confident sprinkle-it-liberally-and-some-will-hit-the-mark phase, I’m sure it can’t be long before I start actually writing Proper English.

Manifesto-in’:

WE ARE THE SPLACISTS

We will own this city.
We will take it back.
We will link and shift.
We will affect and be affected.
We will look, and be seen.
We will expose and re-see.
We will glory in the moment, the collage, the marking and then passing on.
We reject the beginning, middle and end.
We reject your shopping centre, your pavement, your cultural quarter.
We will build our own constructs.
We will build our own bridges.
We will find the edges and push them.
We will fail spectacularly, vitally, elegantly.
We will span.
We will look up, down, under and behind.
We will leap.
We will invite others to do these things too.
We will make exchanges.
We will make adventures.
We will make beautiful moments.
We will reveal the ugly.
We will hold your hand.
We will whisper in your ear ‘let go’.
We will run, skip and jump.
We will be motionless.
We might dance.
We will dream.
We will be generous, but we may subtle about it, too.
We will reclaim the city, not for you, but with you.
We are you.

WE ARE ALSO THE TECHNOLSPLACISTS

We will learn how to use the tools that make the things we want to happen happen.
We will help others learn wherever we can.
We will construct our manifesto – collaboratively – online, because the Internet is also a space :)
We will shift between space, online and off, taking on the form and the arena that suits us best.
We will bodily augment the layers of virtual space, story, marketing, capitalism, that exist in the city, with our own stories.
We will hold the data-harvesting done in the city in the name of ‘games’ (foursquare, loyalty cards) accountable.
We will find our own energy sources.
We will learn how to flex the central nervous system of the city – the data streams in its weather detectors, CCTV, red light cameras – for our own aims.
We will release all that we can via creative commons, so that they can be reclaimed, remixed, re-purposed.
We will cut, and we will paste.
“Plagiarism is necessary, progress demands it.”
We will pervade.
We will not be technosplacist when being splacist will suffice.
We will never underestimate the power of gaffa/electrical/masking tape
We will be artful. We will be skillful. We will fail usefully.

fin

*and having females involved.

**I’m taking the piss, lots of my PhD is on the SI, please don’t come out of the woodwork now, Situationist sticklers.

Image shared on Flickr by somegeekintn via a CC license

I saw two very different pieces this week. Both made me react quite strongly so I thought I’d scribble a few lines about them. (aside: what’s the typing equivalent of scribble? Patter?)

Although really very different pieces, one devised, one scripted, one raucous and difficult, the other anxious and heartfelt, it felt like they were both, in some way about inarticulacy; Ugly the inarticulacy of a potential then, What I Heard About the World about the inarticulacy of being, now. Here are some thoughts:

Ugly

Ugly is a piece touring regionally with Red Ladder Theatre, the script is by Emma Adams and is a really challenging piece which I struggled with. It was only actually by the post-show discussion that it really began to work for me. That’s the first time how I felt about a piece has been changed so dramatically by talking with people involved. <insert something about me being stubborn>

Both the text and the direction was relentless. There were no still characters, no still moments, even moments of (opted) coitus were frenetic and impersonal, the characters seemed to be archetypes left out in the sun too long then fed a combination of amphetamines and ritalin, and the language warped and broke and jarred and choked with swear words. I struggled to hold my attention to it because it rattled on without respite. And I think that now feels like it was the point. It was not structurally sound. It felt like it was too long. And it said big things, at the same time as (with the frequent swears) saying nothing. It was a flawed vehicle about a flawed future. When I got back from Twitter I described it as a mix of Alice in Wonderland and Threads. And as I pile similes and metaphors on you – you hopefully see something, too, of inarticulacy. The experience of the play, not the words or the action, is where the heart of it lay.

But I also think that this play wasn’t really for me – not that I didn’t like it, but that for me, it’s not necessary. It was a piece for younger people, the ones who don’t see beyond now because as yet their life doesn’t require them to, and don’t connect the many news reports to a future. I don’t need convincing climate change is deadly. And I’m not one to be convinced in such a frenetic, physical way. I think it did want for a greater connection to that audience – this came out afterwards – ‘what happened in between’, ‘how did it get to that’ – they needed a glimpse of something they could recognise, to tie them back to their own lives. But it stubbornly refused that. And that’s a point in itself – you won’t recognise anything apart from that these are people. But some of them aren’t even that.

The other Climate Change Play that has stuck with me for a long time is (the lovely) Steve Water’s Contingency Plan. A completely different, very realistic, near-future double bill about flooding somewhere very like my home county and Westminster’s reaction to it. The script was an exquisite piece of almost porcelain sculpture – and as Steve, and like me, cerebral at heart. That was my watershed. But I think for a few people, younger, Ugly might be theirs.

What I Heard About the World

The ink bleeding from an upturned plane, sunk in a salted fish tank. A love song for a massacre. A little girl with magical powers. The sound of…

These are images swimming in my mind after seeing What I Heard About the World last night.

This piece, devised by Sheffield’s Third Angel with the Portuguese Mala Voadora was a much gentler, stiller, but also more anxious experience. It felt more about the weight of storytelling, the weight of being the storyteller. It took me about 15 minutes to settle into and I think I’ve put my finger on that being down to each of the 3 people in the piece’s approaches. Alex felt like himself, telling stories – Chris, with his mode of um’s and er’s felt more writerly, but at the same time as someone performing someone telling stories, and then Jorge felt much more like ‘just’ a performer. As though each of them took on a different stage in the telling of the stories they’d been given.

The piece was nicely woven together, I appreciated the music (and hint towards storytelling of old) and the linking sections of action and fast rambled accounts of the real-life journeys to reach the places talked about. My opening unease about not really knowing whose piece it was – which character it belonged to – relaxed, as it felt like mostly that actually it belonged to none of them, all of them, both.

In a very different way to Ugly there was again something there about inarticulacy – this time the inarticulacy of being in the world and the decisions – conscious or unthought – which we make in order to fit it in our heads.

The end section really brought this into focus, and reminded me of a passage I just read from a book on Heidegger;

“What art can do is bear witness not to the sublime, but to the aporia [undecidability] of art and to its pain. It does not say the unsayable, but says that it cannot say it. ‘After Auschwitz’ it is necessary, according to Eli Weisel, to add yet another verse to the story of the forgetting of the recollection beside the fire in the forest. I cannot light the fire, I do not know the prayer, I can no longer find the spot in the forest, I cannot even tell the story any longer. All I know how to do is to say that I no longer know to tell this story. And this should be enough. This has to be enough.” – Lyotard, here

Particularly for the (character of?) Chris Thorpe, the piece felt like it was hinting towards a kind of liberal inarticulacy. A want for parity in world that offers none, a need to not take stories as wide-brushstroke constructions, when as soon as they’re told, that’s what they become. And a resistance to narrative causality, because you know that the bad stories end with an ending that can’t be undone. At the last, he can’t take the accountability, and reads instead from a worn piece of paper – to me that said ‘this one isn’t my responsibility’.

Although perhaps it was just ‘I haven’t had time to memorise this yet, so we aged the paper to make it look intentional’.

[see what I did there?]

Image shared by delgaudm on flickr via a creative commons license.

I’ve just returned from the TaPRA (Theatre and Performance Research Association) annual conference in Cardiff. I was there part of the Theatre and Philosophy Working Group, and delivered a joint paper with my supervisor Dan Watt. The first half of the session was a soundwalk I made which can be heard over here and the second half two papers that converged. This was my half of the paper. We wanted to provoke discussion on the growing irrelevancies of the ‘broadcasting’ conference form, in age that is more like a network, as well as its ability to interrogate performance. We didn’t aim to provide solutions, but offer a provocation. Following the main part of the conference the working group began to plan an interim event more like a symposium crashed together with game play, both performative and academic… Read on for more on the provocation

A Paper without Organs, or, Detours in Theatre and Thinking

‘We are in the era of the simultaneous, of juxtaposition, of the near and far, of the side-by-side, of the scattered. We exist in a moment when the world is experiencing, I believe, something less like a great life that would develop through time than like a network that connects points and weaves its skin’ (Foucoult, The Essential Works II, 175) (West-Pavlov 2009, 18)

Christopher Sandberg (2004) […] calls for a different audience theory […] He asserts that in order to fully understand and appreciate a larp [live action role playing game], one must participate in it. This creates a sort of first person audience” (Montola, Stenros and Waern 2009, 54)

Subtlemobs, Hide and Seek, and the urban environment

The performance event is changing, is melding, is mashing up with the new narrative strategies emerging from contemporary digital culture. It is moving into the urban environment, and through an embodied audience. The age of the first person is coming; gaming culture, and the ludic heritage of our childhoods are merging with performative, pedagogical practices and forming the pervasive game.

[…] pervasive games are not new human activities. […] Play becomes pervasive only in a modern society that erects boundaries to be pervaded by such games. (Montola, Stenros and Waern 2009, 257)

Pervasive games can be defined as play expanded out of traditional performative or ludic space in one or all of three ways; spatially (it moves through everyday space), temporally (it is interacted with throughout everyday time) or socially (it is played with/around the public).

Contemporary life has brought us “the proliferation of spaces whose function seems only to be to facilitate our ‘passing through’” (Buchanan and Lambert 2005, 3-4). Pervasive games oppose this by moving into the streets, inhabiting them

“The act of walking is to the urban system what the speech act is to language”  (McDonough 2004, 290)

Hide&Seek is the foremost pervasive gaming company in the UK. Their processes are collective, anyone can design a game, anyone can edit, their events are free to attend, touring ‘Sandpits’ are used to trial – ‘beta-test’ – and improve games, and regular large events and festivals are held where a diverse range of game designers run the most successful.

These games are playful explorations of constructing and re-constructing our selves, powerfully détourn-ing our relationships with the spaces and people around us. They do so in a ubiquitous fashion that the Situationists, those hackers of urban space, would have recognised as revolutionary.

Alex Fleetwood of Hide&Seek describes their works as:

A way of getting people to break that unwritten social law of don’t interact with your fellow man, just walk along the city, and be an automaton in your own space (Hide&seek 2007)

The game Scoop! arranges three teams into ‘genres’ of journalists; tabloid, broadsheet, and gossip magazine. Armed with small video cameras, each team heads out to film several stories. They get points for stories, certain props, and bonus points if they are able to film other teams. This simple ludic structure belies a thicker connection with the media as narrative construct, and genre outlook.

Vampires is a game to be played at night. There are 3 secret vampires with an array of ‘bite’ cards, 20 villagers, and ‘stake’ and ‘holy water’ cards hidden around a city area. The villagers’ task is to find 15 stake cards, and return them to a ‘safe place’ before the time is up. Villagers who are bitten are handed ‘bite’ cards, and if a villager suspects someone they can throw a torn up holy water card in a participant’s face. The game is frightening to play, you suspect everyone, it re-reveals the fear of walking around city space at night.

These games “transform the way we understand space.” (Montola, Stenros and Waern 2009, 78), but also allow us to recognise the construct of what has gone before, participants – and the spaces in which they play – are unbalanced.

[…] a deliberate act of unbalancing, an unworkable conjunction that ‘forges alliances… according to the circumstances’ (Deleuze 1997b: 256). (Watt 2009, 94)

This is alos the lived-play that the situationsts called for, no longer holed up in sanctioned ‘art space’; this is art, lived.

The role of the “public”, if not passive at least a walk-on, must ever diminish, while the share of those who cannot be called actors but, in a new meaning of the term, “livers,” will increase. (Debord 2004, 47)

Pervasive gaming de-territorialises being by placing the subject in immersive or ludic situations and inhabiting our urban unspace. Pervasive games are the realm in which Deleuze’s

[…] machine of minor literature can give way to a playful environment where thought and words become movement (Watt 2009, 100)

The Subtlemob is another, more traditionally narrative-driven pervasive form. Developed by Duncan Speakman, the Subtlemob takes the mass congregation and playful reclamation of the flashmob[1] and turns into a kind of first person performance; inhabiting story.

[…] the new space, like new machines, can only be represented in motion (Buchanan, Space in the Age of Non-Place 2005, 19)

As if it Were the Last Time is a Subtlemob for two. Participants congregate in a designated street, and at specified time play an mp3. Instructions, sounds, and stories inhabit them as they drift around the space. The narrative is not Aristotlean, rather more like a collage. You are asked to find places that feel natural to you, where you feel safe or uncomfortable, to look at the tops of building and in the faces of passersby; to change direction in return for eye contact, and to enact a small moment of intimacy. The piece ends with a dance, suddenly a street that was seemingly contained just two conspirators is full of laughing, dancing people.

Speakman’s first-person audience presents a deterritorialisation of the self.

[…] the process whereby the very basis of one’s identity, […] is eroded, washed away like the bank of a river swollen by floodwater – immersion. (Buchanan, Space in the Age of Non-Place 2005, 23)

At the same time as video games are becoming a dominant entertainment form, social media sees brand, identity, and play becoming re-constructed, integral; a kind of digital prosthesis. The Subtlemob uses immersion to construct a piece of performance out of the shards of our selves. Briefly, you are wholly in a place you would normally pass through, fragmented.

Audience Centrism and Coney

These processes are happening in more conventional theatre-spaces too. As in A Small Town Anywhere by The Agency of Coney.

Coney itself plays like a game of secret society, with members taking codenames in chapters […] all over the world. […] This secret society is led by RABBIT[2]. Anyone who is game can join. (Coney n.d.)

A Small Town Anywhere, performed in 2009, was devised over two years with Battersea Arts Centre as part of their ‘Not for Me, Not for You, but for Us’ festival.

The show has its roots in a French film called Le Corbeau (The Raven) about a mysterious poison-pen writer plaguing a nameless French village. Made by Henri-Georges Clouzot in 1943, it was a covert critique of Nazi-occupied France, in which countless people were denouncing their neighbours to the authorities by letter. (Gardner 2009)

The piece for roughly 30 people is set in a small, ordinary town represented by an space in the BAC theatre. Participants go about their assumed daily lives until the postal service (a series of pigeon holes populated by messages handed to the postman/woman each day) reveals that a suspicious character, ‘Raven’, seems to know too much of the townspeople’s secrets. These secrets, and the townspeople’s characters are worked out in advance. The task of the piece is to discover and cast out the nefarious ‘Raven’. Accusations are made, and at the end, a trial is held; the person found guilty banished.

[…] because there is no audience in a traditional sense, all social anxiety […] quickly evaporates. I play it as if it’s real – and that’s exactly how it feels. For two hours, I lose myself in the show. (ibid)

The placing of the participant at the heart of the world-constituting process embodies the ease with which worlds are created, and crucially, destroyed. This is a profoundly pedagogical and political act, indeed, as Andy Field says:

Politics is as much about form as it is about content. It is a way of doing things. Interpersonal relationships, the structure of our communities, our reading of and relationship to the place we inhabit. How we understand our being in the world. (Field, Playing Games 2010)

Through the disequilibrium produced by the first-person audience, the experience of theatre itself is minorized.

Games and art

‘We are reminding ourselves of what, unexperienced and unthought, underlies our familiar and therefore outworn notion of truth […]’ (PLT: 52) (Clark 2002, 22)

The mashup of play and art found at the heart of pervasive gaming and interactive performance offers the tools with which we can de- and reconstruct our space and selves.

[…] the art work is not just something that comes into the open, next to other things, it changes the Open in which it appears. (Clark 2002, 44)

In a way, the inscription of these stories upon the bodies of their participants are a form of lived philosophy, that which Heidegger’s strained language, and Deleuze’s painful schizo yearnings failed to achieve. It is truly about movement, the playing, and not the final destination. ‘Passage through, not direction towards’ (Watt 2009, 94)

As the ‘postdramatic performance event manifests itself in increasingly diverse and localised forms’[3], one must question the ability of academia, as it is currently constructed, to interrogate, understand, or even represent it.

The process of the academy and the process of making performance

The theatre of the future does not achieve itself. It is a movement. It is a mode of being that is in process. It is characterised most notably as having no place in which to dwell because it no longer finds its home in the theatre. (Watt 2009, 93)

Academia needs to acknowledge the growing irrelevancy of its modes and methods of presentation, both in the context of a hyper-connected, levelling and wiki-culture world, and in the context of performance which is returning to play, to the language of dialogue.

Theatre is live, handmade – reactive, ephemeral, messy. It is at its best when it shows its workings, when it acknowledges the processes that went into making it: the conversations, the long walks, the ideas, the wrong turns, the moments of improbable luck. It’s when this happens that theatre becomes not just art, not just entertainment, but a dialogue (Field, Forest Fringe Diary: Doing Theatre, Bristol Fashion 2009)

This process is also true of academic thought; to acknowledge only the destination is to fail.

But that’s OK.

Each failure is a masterpiece, a branch of the rhizome. (Deleuze and Guattari 1986: 38-39) (Watt 2009, 98)

We simply need to find ourselves another way.

There is a form of conference emerging from the digital world – the unconference. The unconference is about dialogue, there are no speakers, only provocations. Groups of attendees will discuss, share, move to different tables, join different discussions. Attendees become participants; the monologue, a dialogue.

The process has its shortcomings, discussions repeat themselves, and often contain less rigour and depth. They are not necessarily our solution, but they are a recognition that the conference form, as it stands, is not suited to the truth of our processes, or the worlds which they now attempt to explore.

[…] as games continue to grow larger and more important, they will [… force] us to rethink the categories of creator, audience, and work that currently structure our thinking. Instead of becoming a new globally dominant form of message sending and receiving, they will shift our focus away from the idea of broadcasting […] to a new way of thinking about meaning–creation that is more like a network, like a conversation from which meanings emerge. (Montola, Stenros and Waern 2009, 248)

Works Cited

Buchanan, Ian. “Space in the Age of Non-Place.” In Deleuze and Space, by Ian Buchanan and Gregg Lambert. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2005.

Buchanan, Ian, and Gregg Lambert. Deleuze and Space. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2005.

Clark, Timothy. Martin Heidegger. London: Routledge, 2002.

Coney. The Society. http://youhavefoundconey.net/secretsociety.html (accessed September 3, 2010).

Debord, Guy. “Report in the Construction of Situations.” In Guy Debord and the Situationist Internatinal, edited by Tom McDonough. Massachusetts: MIT Press, 2004.

Field, Andy. Forest Fringe Diary: Doing Theatre, Bristol Fashion. 27 August 2009. http://www.guardian.co.uk/culture/2009/aug/27/forest-fringe-diary-bristol (accessed September 3, 2010).

Field, Andy. Playing Games. 20 February 2010. http://www.connected-uk.org/join-the-conversation/playing-games/ (accessed March 16, 2010).

Gardner, Lyn. Join in the Murder Game and Battersea Arts Centre. 19 October 2009. http://www.guardian.co.uk/stage/2009/oct/19/murder-game-battersea-arts-centre (accessed September 3, 2010).

Hide&seek. “Hide and Seek documentary.” YouTube. Edited by Mike Tamman. Alex Fleetwood. 25 11 2007. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FMz7WA01aC4&feature=player_embedded (accessed 5 3, 2010).

McDonough, Tom. “Situationist Space.” In Guy Debord and the Situationist International, edited by Tom McDonough. Massachusetts: MIT Press, 2004.

Montola, Markus, Kaakko Stenros, and Annika Waern. Pervasive Games. Massachusetts: Morgan Kaufmann, 2009.

Trueman, Matt. Review: A Small Town Anywhere, Battersea Arts Centre. 27 October 2009. http://carouseloffantasies.blogspot.com/2009/10/review-small-town-anywhere-battersea.html (accessed September 3, 2010).

Watt, Daniel. “Performing, Strolling, Thinking: From Minor Literature to Theatre of the Future .” In Deleuze and Performance, edited by Laura Cull, 91-101. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2009.

West-Pavlov, Russell. Space in Theory, Kristeva, Foucault, Deleuze. New York: Rodopi, 2009.

Creative commons tracks used and works cited in the soundwalk:

‘once a living sea’ by cellodreams, shared via a creative commons license at http://soundcloud.com/cellodreams/once-a-living-sea

‘bell tolls’ by cellodreams, shared via a creative commons license at http://soundcloud.com/cellodreams/bell-tolls

‘It Felt Weird’ by Valiska, shared via a creative commons license at http://soundcloud.com/valiska/it-felt-weird

Artaud, Antonin (1975) To Have Done with the Judgement of God, trans. Clayton Eshleman and Norman Glass, Sparrow 34, July 1975, (no pagination).

Bataille, Georges (1985) Visions of Excess: Selected Writings, 1927-1939, ed. Allan Stoekl (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press)

Beckett, Samuel (1979) The Beckett Trilogy: Molloy, Malone Dies, The Unnamable, Picador: London.

Deleuze, Gilles (1997a) Difference and Repetition, trans. Paul Patton, Athlone Press: London.

Deleuze, Gilles (1997b) ‘One Less Manifesto’ in Mimesis, Masochism, and Mime. The Politics of Theatricality in Contemporary French Thought. Ed. Timothy Murray. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, pp. 239-258.

Deleuze, Gilles and Guattari, Félix (1994) What is Philosophy?, trans. Hugh Tomlinson and Graham Burchell, Columbia University Press: New York.

Heidegger, Martin (1993) ‘Building, Dwelling, Thinking’ in Basic Writings, ed. David Farrel Krell, London: Routledge, pp. 347-363.

[1] The mass congregation of people without warning, united in some form of action. The roots of it as political device can be traced back to the absurd actions of the Orange Alternative Happenings in 1980s Communist Poland, the form is typically now more mundane, and is being heavily colonised by the commercial world.

[2] Rabbit here could be seen as a direct nod to the term coined by game designers describing the beginning of a game as an invitation to fall down Alice’s rabbit hole Markus Montola, Kaakko Stenros and Annika Waern, Pervasive Games (Massachusetts: Morgan Kaufmann, 2009)..

[3] As per the abstract for this paper.

These are three short pieces which appear in the half hour soundwalk I’m working on for the joint paper I’m currently working on. There’s a bit more information on the intent of the piece here. The sound work is currently finding itself structured around little snippets of story, all with the idea of looking at things as they are, without the way that expectation dulls them. As some philosophers might say, ‘un-covering’.

A story about thinking

You sit for days getting angrier and angrier at yourself. You speak sharply to your loved ones over the phone, you rearrange days with more and more unlikely workloads and cancel days off. You stop replying to emails, you fall asleep reading books and dream fitfully of not being able to speak. You feel like your eyes are swimming in vinegar and sand. And then, suddenly, you crack. You pull on you shoes, and a battered old coat, and you go for a walk.

A story about walking

You realise that you have not breathed fresh air for days. The air feels cool in your lungs. Reminds you of the first scent of winter on cold Autumn dawns. A fine mist of rain falls on your forehead, like the spray of the sea. You walk, and you realise that you have had your jaw clenched. You drift, and you notice the leaves beginning to litter the ground. You walk, and it is the movement that is important, the being-there, in context. Your forehead unwrinkles, and you close your eyes. Your mind is blissfully clear, no longer scrunched up as if un-vigilant, an important piece of knowledge could fall out your ears. You find yourself at home, walk through the door, you turn off the internet, and write 3000 words. It took a week, but also, half a day. Time skitters by. You call your loved ones and apologise.

A story about thought

There are people we send out, like scouts, into the darkness. They cannot see where they are going, they stub their toes, and walk into walls, but eventually, they know enough to construct a map. These people sometimes meet up, to discuss what they have found, and hopefully make the maps fuller; but instead of talking of the mistakes they made, and thet hings they felt on their way, they talk of the strength of their lines, and the certainty of the lettering on their drawings.

“A strong-minded woman! Much like her mother, eh? Wears green spectacles and writes learned books … She wants to upset the universe, and play dice with the hemispheres. Women never know when to stop … “ William Gibson and Bruce Sterling, The Difference Engine.

A large part of the history of the struggle for women’s rights has been the fight for participation in the public sphere; for the vote, for a say in politics, economic rights, for a voice, and worth in the public arena. We hear again and again that technology is a powerful tool, that blogs and social networking phenomena such as Twitter are becoming more and more involved in politics, and that people gather, communicate, and agitate from online. There is no doubt that as a forum for discussion and a place to co-ordinate action, technology is an invaluable platform. New online tools are creating a new public sphere – in such a fast moving medium, we simply cannot afford to be left behind. Women need to be on the front line, both participating in and originating new technology, and whilst women represent roughly 55% of the people online, and a 2008 study by Tesco’s Computers for Schools initiative found that from as early as seven years old, girls are outstripping boys when it comes to computer literacy (Taherreport, 2008), this isn’t being born out in the tech industry itself:

While women influence 80% of consumer spending decisions, 90% of technology products and services are designed by men [...] Women make up approximately 20% (and sometimes less) of panelists at major tech conferences. Even fewer are asked to be keynote speakers. Furthermore, women in tech are rarely quoted and sought out as experts by the mainstream media covering technology. (Kapin, 2009)

Women are hideously underrepresented in the tech world, this is due to more universal problems encountered by women in and en route to the work place, but it is also down to the pervading myth (and it is a myth, but one that unfortunately one that is woven into our education right from the kinds of toys that children are given to learn from) that women just can’t do tech as well as men. What is largely accepted as true is that role models are one of the best ways to break down that misconception. Enter Ada Lovelace Day – A day named after the world’s first computer programmer – countess of Lovelace, Ada. Ada Lovelace Day brings bloggers together to share stories and role models of women that are important to the/their history of digital technology/computing.

There are plenty of excellent programmers and engineers which other people are going to do much better justice than I. The person I have decided to talk about is a bit different, but the kind of person who I think also makes a big difference. I’d have to, really, because she’s an academic.

Theorists are often seen as derivative of the do-ers, but Ada Lovelace, devoid of the hardware that could run her code, was in essence a theorist, some of the biggest imaginative leaps can cause the biggest scientific and technological pushes. This short blog post today is dedicated to Sadie Plant.

I discovered Sadie Plant first as a writer on the complex and revolutionary artistic ideas of the Situationist International – looking at how advance capitalism can be tackled by the revelation of the spectacle, before discovering that she founded the Cybernetic Culture Research Unit at the University of Warwick, and then getting my hands on a (signed, no less, thanks go out to @toodamnninja for that find) copy of Zeros + Ones.

Zeroes + Ones is a magnificent piece of writing, a glorious, hubristic, and enthusiastic look at women in digital technoculture. It moves from science fiction, to the history of zero, to Freud, Frankenstein, and Ada Lovelace in her own words; tracing the history of women as portrayed in technoculture, and women as the body of digital tech. Plant looks at weaving and the Jacquard Loom‘s punched cards as a precursor to the analytical engine,  the notion of binary sex/gender, and how the way women have had to exist in the workplace places them ideally for the way workplaces are reconfiguring in a digital age. Through a complex and incredibly varied text Plant allows Ada herself to emerge as a kind of guide, the book progressing as an almost ode to Ada’s mind:

“‘nothing but very close & intense application to subjects of a scientific nature now seems at all to keep my imagination from running wild, or to stop up the void which seems to be left in my mind from a want of excitement’”

Plant looks at how women, given the task of interfacing throughout history – the secretary, the PA, the typist, the telephone operator – find themselves ideally suited to the future of tech, as well as woven throughout its history:

“When computers were vast systems of transistors and valves which needed to be coaxed into action, it was women who turned them on. They have not made some trifling contribution to an otherwise man-made tale: when computers became the miniaturised circuits of silicon chips, it was women who assembled them. Theirs is not a subsidiary role which needs to be rescued for posterity, a small supplement whose inclusion would set the existing records straight: when computers were virtually real machines, women wrote the software on which they ran. And when computer was a term applied to flesh and blood workers, the bodies which composed them were female. Hardware, software wetware–before their beginnings and beyond their ends, women have been the simulators, assemblers, and programmers of the digital machines.”

The first computer programming language was named Ada, after the founder of modern computer programming; Ada Lovelace. Women played a key role in code-breaking at Bletchley Park during WWII, in 1942 the ENIAC (the first general-purpose electronic  computer) was programmed by six women and Grace Hopper, the second programmer, inspired the development of the COBOL programming language. Women are the majority of online users (55%) and tech consumers (80%).  When I speak to my programming friends they have no clue about any of this. The battle (as ever) for women in tech is reclaiming our past as well as our present.

Plant then looks to the future, touching on Donna Haraway’s Cyberfeminist manifesto and at ideas of consciousness and cyborgs in fiction, theory, and reality:

“Only the most highly coded and perfectly integrated machines are unable to see the extent of their own programming. The bladerunner’s blind conviction in his own humanity proves only how efficient the programming can be.”

Zeroes + Ones was written in 1997 and is an invaluable book for all people interested and working in the world of technology. Looking back, as well as far forward the ideas, facts, figures and concepts shifting under its covers slowly reveal a full picture, pregnant with the full potential of a powerful, feminine, digital age.

Buy it, read it. Laugh, smile, disagree, but above all, feature this fuller history in your mind and in your deeds, because, as an excellent blog post I read today puts it:

“the problem is […] thoughtlessness, a kind of – oh, God, I’m going to say it – institutional sexism, where nobody thinks to notice and object because nobody realises what’s happening. […] it’s not what we believe and value that counts. It’s not what we think in our head and hearts that counts. It’s what we do, often by mistake and often without knowing that we’re doing it. It’s what we do when that effectively runs counter to what we believe that needs attending to.” Colin Smith

My Ada Lovelace Day is dedicated to Sadie Plant, because nothing has shown me that as a woman I belong in tech – and that it belongs to me – better and brighter than this book.

In scattered and barely noticed ways, the desire to construct one’s own life was shaping the twentieth century (McDonough 2004, 10)

From the bypassing of human interface devices (HIDs) such as mice and keyboards represented by the iPhone and the iPad, to the removal of a media interface represented by the increasing popularity of social media, the current trend in digital technology centres around the removal of the interface. This trend has recently been seen as becoming increasingly prevalent in theatre and performance.

[A] key ’09 [theatre] trend was the removal of performers from performances altogether. Whether directed by headphones or left to negotiate for themselves […] increasingly the spectator was becoming the spectacle. (Haydon 2009)

In 2009 the biggest selling entertainment item on Amazon.co.uk was a video game – COD:MW2 outsold both Harry Potter and Twilight on DVD. We spent 30% more on video games last year than we did on going to the cinema and purchasing DVDs combined. And in a recent survey done by the BBC, 100% of 6-10 year olds gamed regularly.

With gaming you’re involved and in control. With other things you just have to sit back and watch. I’ve been gaming for most of my life. – Callum, aged 10 (BBC 2005 Source (PDF))

Although digital strategies and ideas have been examined in a performative context since the 1960s, this technology and these strategies have reached a point where they are ubiquitous enough to form a real trend in narrative consumption. As thus ours is a culture becoming much more used to being embedded in its stories, political as well as social. In Theatre and Performance in a Digital Culture Matthew Causey discusses the political move from simulation to embeddedness, suggesting that

The site of power has shifted from the exterior screens of simulation to the interior body of the material subject. (Causey 2006, 179)

The example drawn by Causey contrasts the illusion of Gulf War I – of cut together clips, narrators, and news packages – to the rolling embedded coverage of Gulf War II. ‘This is happening now’, the spectacle says, ‘there is no room for editing, cutting, or simulation; this is reality’. In our age of so-called reality TV, 24-hour rolling news, and the advent of the ‘real-time’ and ‘social’ web, we are witnessing a corruption of the data-flow of contemporary life. We are led to believe that the data we receive is live, uncut, unmediated and true. As thus we lose the critical tools afforded us by distance and reflection. It is the ‘interior body of the material subject’ where the political battle for subjectivity must now be fought, in our selves.

Pervasive gaming and interactive theatre takes the digital idea of player-as-protagonist, and applies it to the lived body of performance. Pervasive games are ‘playful experiences’ which combine aspects of childhood parlour games and video game ethics and t to be played in groups across large urban spaces, interactive theatre moves these ideas into thicker narratives. Both forms allow the audience to become agent, and can be seen to expand their storytelling over space, technology, and/or time.

“All theatre is interactive. To call this diverse spectrum of work ‘Interactive Arts’, is only to suggest that it acknowledges that relationship and seeks, in some way, to interrogate it.” (Field 2010)

The player-as-protagonist form borrows from the actor of theatre and the avatar of online worlds, but removes the interface, allowing the user to play with aspects of the double and the void in the self. Allowing us to interrogate our selves as constructs, the player-as-protagonist format brings us back to a truer sense of self and reality, through their present absence.

Absences – of meaning, participation, reality, and identity – can constitute useful tactics in the struggle to unmask the social and economic relations of contemporary capitalist society. (Plant 1992, 181)

Though these pervasive games and interactive performances often involve recorded or other technology, which can disengage you, this is countered by the danger of placing you as the avatar in the world-constituting process. These kinds of performances represent:

An embracing of the total impossibility of getting away from the world around us. So much theatre strives to make the stage into an almost sanctified other place […] A space for coolness and distance and clarity. For conveying social messages and great untainted truths. But I don’t think you can hold back the weight of the world. It comes flooding in regardless. [interactive theatre/art] doesn’t just understand that, it relies on it. It swims in reality. (Field, In the World Not About the World 2010)

However it is important to note that one very integral aspect of the political power of theatre is in danger of being lost to immersion.

The major objection against immersion is the alleged incompatibility of the experience with the exercise of critical faculties. (Ryan 2001, 10)

Branding, politics, media and art are all exhibiting a shift towards the immersive, personal – or hyperlocal. A radical or uncritical shift towards the hyperlocal could be incredibly dangerous. If you forward politics only on an individual basis or understanding you lose a sense of the bigger ‘better good’. You lose the politics of community, the politics that acknowledges that in some aspects we are all alike, and should all have equal footing, privilege and rights. How far is the hyperlocal different from a proactive version of NIMBYism? 

Likewise we need to acknowledge the dangers posed to people’s sense of self and belief, by work that so directly involves audiences. We no longer rely on a set, actors, a whole audience to maintain the suspension of disbelief, but one person on whom the whole of their narrative rests. Although we are more and more used to traversing different worlds and identities in virtual and real spaces, we also need to acknowledge that these conceptions of the ‘self’ are still very rigid. There’s something to be said for easing people away from hegemonic visions of identity, encouraging fluidity, but we should also acknowledge that to assume a fluid transition, assumes identity is a blank slate, sculpted, opted. Does this also apply to people who aren’t white, CIS-gered, hetero, able bodied, middle class, developed-world men? What about the majority cast as an ongoing ‘Other’ – to whom identity is more important, or more integral, people who are defined by their difference? Identity is dangerous when it is thoughtlessly fragmented or assaulted.

However within this danger lies a new political power. When the arts immerse people in narrative we are asking them to augment their bodily identity, an action much more powerful and dangerous than its equivalent in a virtual space.

Our bodies are where we experience the intersection of our individuality and the cultural sphere. (Hillis 1999, 172)

There’s something of using our physical bodies to explore aspects of digital, political and mediatised embeddedness which is incredibly important – which seeks to reconcile our lived body with our virtual selves (mediated or performed). This produces a kind of ‘mixed’ or augmented reality that requires a gentler and more playful set of performative tactics to support participants and preserve a connection to community and critical faculties.

These tactics are best exemplified by the work of people and companies such as Duncan Speakman, Coney, and Blast Theory. These works are often locative and site-specific, they are rooted – allowing for the safety of the participant, and for a connection to the ‘bigger picture’. Blast Theory’s Rider Spoke and Duncan Speakman’s Always Something Somewhere Else are self-created and generative pieces of work that use GPS units

[…] to discover fragments of other people’s audio recordings, [creating] a space in which digital tracking equipment can do more than just map our place within a geographical grid. It can remake our relationship to the rich network of memories and thoughts and people that truly make up the city we inhabit.  (Field, Playing Games 2010)

The most effective of this work also uses the more traditional TIE ideas of role-play to explore issues of morality and community on a narrative/micro level, whilst the bodily presence and physical engagement acknowledges the macro/societal. In a recent series of blogs for the British Council, Andy Field describes how work such as Coney’s Small Town Anywhere and Blast Theory’s Day of the Figurines allow us to engage with

[…] a society at a point of fracture and collapse. We engage not by watching but by playing – by becoming one small fragment of this disintegrating world. (Ibid)

This is a profoundly political act, indeed, as Field goes on to say:

Politics is as much about form as it is about content. It is a way of doing things. Interpersonal relationships, the structure of our communities, our reading of and relationship to the place we inhabit. How we understand our being in the world. What [interactive arts] allow us is an opportunity to explore and experiment with how we do things. In displacing or undermining our usual, unconsidered way of relating to the people and things around us, they generate a vital context for reflection and experimentation. (Ibid)

These works deftly combine the intense and culturally relevant player-as-protagonist format with a political power that respects the weight of the immersive experience. The tactics are playful, but this does not mean they are trivial. By writing its stories on the bodies of its participants performance is able to hand people the critical tools to interrogate our culture of embeddness. We are able to locate the battleground of the ‘interior body of the material subject’ and the player-as-protagonist can become the player-as-political.

Works Cited.

BBC. “Digital Play, Digital Lifestyles.” BBC Creative Research and Development. Alice Taylor & Dr Adrian Woolard. December 2005.

http://open.bbc.co.uk/newmediaresearch/files/BBC_UK_Games_Research_2005.pdf (accessed March 18, 2010).

Causey, Matthew. Theatre and Performance in a Digital Culture, from simulation to Embeddedness. Oxon: Routledge, 2006.

Field, Andy. In the World Not About the World. Febuary 25, 2010. http://www.connected-uk.org/join-the-conversation/in-the-world-not-about-the-world/ (accessed March 16, 2010).

Field, Andy. Interactivity. Febuary 10, 2010. http://www.connected-uk.org/join-the-conversation/interactivity/ (accessed March 16, 2010)

Field, Andy, Playing Games. February 20, 2010. http://www.connected-uk.org/join-the-conversation/playing-games/ (accessed March 16, 2010).

Haydon, Andrew. The year in theatre: trends of 2009. December 30, 2009.  http://www.guardian.co.uk/stage/theatreblog/2009/dec/30/theatre-trends-2009 (accessed January 1, 2010).

Hillis, Ken. Digital Sensations, Space, Identity, and embodiment in virtual reality (. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1999.

Plant, Sadie. The Most Radical Gesture, the Situationist International in a Postmodern Age. London: Routledge, 1992.

Ryan, Marie-Laure. Narrative as Virtual Reality, Immersion and Interactivity in Literature and Electronic Media. . Baltimore: The John Hopkins University Press, 2001.

This is a post about identity politics in the spaces between personal and professional that we now inhabit.

My ideas aren’t fully formed on this yet, but I thought it was important to open up a discussion, because (as I intend to go on to say) it’s important to get a collective as well as personal view on this, because as much as new mediums suggest that I am at the centre of my social and political universe, and as politics and marketing turn their sights to the hyperlocal, I believe the collective, and the universal should still be part of the dialogue.

At the NCVO New Politics conference that I attended in early January there was a real sense of charities and not-for-profit organisations turning towards the ‘hyper-local’, an approach that especially suits relatively new social media tools that allow unmediated (in a conventional sense) conversation with individuals. In this interview with a couple of NCVO members organisation representatives, I chatted about this trend.

In a lot of ways a hyperlocal approach is empowering for both parties, but in another way I believe a radical or uncritical shift towards the hyperlocal could be incredibly dangerous. If you forward your cause or politics only on an individual basis – this is how this directly affects you, and why you should care – you lose a sense of the bigger ‘better good’. You lose the politics that acknowledges that in some aspects we are all alike, and should all have equal footing, privilege and rights. Why should someone have to empathise on an individual level to support human rights and environmental causes? How far is hyperlocal different from a proactive version of NIMBYism? This is not the fault of the tools (social media) but how we use them.

There’s another aspect of this shift in personal/professional spaces which is endlessly fascinating to me. As someone who’s very resistant to advertising (it’s the main reason I don’t watch television) and any message that attempts to shape me to a hegemonic vision of consumer driven happiness, I am very conscious of how we are now opening up and splitting ourselves over different platforms, and how vulnerable that makes us to pernicious outside visions of identity.

Don’t get me wrong, I don’t think that twitter, facebook, digital photography, photoshop et al are necessarily dangerous, these are new mediums for a very old way of communicating, I believe we are operating by the same rules as we always have done, just that on here the longtail is evidential, physically left. Recently I’ve been looking after a couple of friends who’ve gone through pretty bad break ups, both of which has been made almost insurmountably worse by the presence of Facebook, Twitter, Flickr – public spaces that are experienced personally, hyperlocally. Whenever I’ve broken up with someone, we’ve always done the 3 month mutual block/unfollow. But it’s always *there*. The long tail to your relationship. The relationship status change.

I went out on Friday night, and found that rather than asking for people’s numbers, 18 and 19 years olds are now more likely to ask for a full name – like a QRcode can hold so much more information than text, a facebook profile gives you so much more upfront. But it is also meticulously constructed, groups are the badges showing politics, bands, humour, unflattering photos are untagged, people are constructing online versions of themselves, whether you want to call it a profile or an avatar or a character, we de- and reconstruct ourselves daily. Are we making ourselves more vulnerable?

Enter personal brand ambassadors

More so than ever before children are being used to influence their peers, via social networking and IRL, on behalf of certain brands. Likewise throughout Twitter and blogs we hear the calls to the ‘personalised brand’ or the personal-as-brand. People (myself included) now find Twitter a space that shifts from personal to professional daily, and indeed this is technically no different to how we exist IRL – we shift between personas daily, at work me, public transport me, parent me, partner me – however extra dangers persist and in the preservation, we can lose context. Does social media focussing on the personal as brand, political, important, or central, distort our world view? And how do we critique a world built on personal brand? What happens when the brands we tire of are implicit? Integral?

There’s something to be said for easing people away from hegemonic visions of identity, encouraging fluidity, but we should also acknowledge that to assume the fluid transition of personal to professional, person to brand, in archived spaces assumes identity is a blank slate, sculpted, opted. Does this also apply to people who aren’t white, CIS, hetero, able bodied, middle class, developed-world men? What about the majority cast as as an ongoing ‘Other’ – to whom identity is more important, or more integral, people who are defined by their difference? Identity is dangerous when it is thoughtlessly fragmented or assaulted – and is at the root of an awful lot of hurt, destruction, and aggression throughout the world.

Acknowledging the cartesian mind/body split is all very well, but the split mightn’t be so simple with people whose bodies have shaped their mind’s experience – as a defining characteristic, a battleground, an Other.

My own experiences haven’t been particularly traumatic, but I have certainly been faced with difficult decisions when it comes to being female and on the internet. For a while I used an unconnected name (I still do on Comment is Free etc.) and photos that you couldn’t really discern me from. I got a bit angry at this, though. Although I’m not happy to fill the public internet (my facebook is mostly private) with pictures of myself as my main ‘selling point’, I also don’t feel like I should have to divorce myself from my image in order to be taken seriously. Which prompts people (even people I valued the opinions of) to accuse me of only having a certain amount of Twitter followers, or interaction online because I was ‘a pretty girl’. In what space will I ever be my words first?

These are fragmented thoughts, on a political, professional and personal level. I want to emphasise that in no way do I think social media, longtails, hyperlocal politics and activism are in any way bad. What it cannot be, however, is the only tool, left uncriticised. I’d be interested in what you think, and whether you think it’s something that’s being talked about enough, or too much. Go forth and comment.

People “have something to lose if they are regarded solely as informational patterns, namely the resistant materiality that … has marked the experience of living as embodied creatures […] Although VR may afford simulated access to a virtual and digitised community of representations — arguably a kind of “global public sphere” achieved at the loss of embeddedness and context — given the individuated manner in which the technology is being developed and will be accessed, the conflation between the conception it affords the user and the user’s own perceptivity needs to be acknowledged and theorised” pp.15-6 N Katherine Hayles in Digital Sensations, by Ken Hillis.

NB I know it’s a bit of a wanky title, but I thought the one I really wanted to use (Cybrands – like Cyborgs, geddit?) looked a bit like a pharmaceutical product, so there we are.

And yes the robot picture is me. I was BORN A GEEK.

click for source

In scattered and barely noticed ways, the desire to construct one’s own life was shaping the twentieth century (McDonough 2004, 10)

Another key ’09 [theatre] trend was the removal of performers from performances altogether. Whether directed by headphones or left to negotiate for themselves in shows like Coney’s Small Town Anywhere, increasingly the spectator was becoming the spectacle. (Haydon 2009)

From 1957-69 a new radical reading of the commodification of western capitalist society emerged. The situationists, born out of the fiery nihilism of the Dadaists and the irreverent playfulness of the Surrealists cast their gaze over society and saw:

That the alienation which in the nineteenth century was rooted in production had, in the twentieth century, become rooted in consumption. Consumption had come to define happiness and to suppress all other possibilities of freedom and selfhood. […] Everyone was first and foremost a member of an economy based on commodities” (McDonough 2004, 3)

The situationists identified a transition from the Marxist state of alienation, to a once-removed state of spectacular illusion. This ‘spectacle’ transformed every inch of our lives into an empty capitalist dream, maintained through the mutation of desires into needs. However the situationists believed that the image of society as it is was still intact behind the spectacle, and so they set about attempting to break the illusion.

“Just as the nineteenth century revolutionary theory arose out of philosophy” –out of Marx’s dictum that philosophy, having interpreted the world, must set about changing it – now one had to look to the demands of art (McDonough 2004, 11)

The situationists saw art as the solution – an art practised by every member of society, an art that ceased to be art and became a continually revised way of seeing.  The situationists (though they didn’t credit it) were summoning the phenomenological ‘bracketing’ aspect of art:

Phenomenologists like to pick objects up with their minds, so to speak, and turn them around, examining them from all sides. This cannot be accomplished by viewing them frontally as they are embedded in the rest of the experiential world – hence bracketing (Roach 1992, 354)

This bracketing aspect – or epoché – that art provides is at the root of its ability to reveal the spectacle.

Art was at the root of the situationists’ calls for reclamation of public space and leisure time, they intended to use it to deconstruct the spectacular way of seeing, and reconstruct playful new ways of being. The tools which the situationists put forward were the détournement and the dérive. The détournement worked within the spectacle to highlight and ridicule the way it presented itself, this was a radical (though playful) reclamation of news footage, advertising, as well as the ridiculing of stars, celebrity and subversion of print material from popular culture.

The situationists also promoted a kind of unitary urbanism, they wanted each individual to augment their own environment; to take it and twist it, to reveal spaces as space, and not a means-to-an-end, a journey to work, the supermarket, a transaction in time. They wanted to reclaim architecture and urban space by subverting its use and design, and to also rediscover it as a place in its own right. They proposed this be done through the dérive. Reclaiming being-oriented rather than commodity-oriented experiencing of space.

The Situationists burned brightly and rapidly. They were radical, didactic, and sought revolution – a revolution built on the reclamation of our individual selves from the spectacle of capitalist society. They recognised that the political function of the arts is to provide people with a vision of the way the world is constructed, and they offered tools to rebuild it in our image. Their ideas reached their culmination with the events of May 1968, but

If the situationist idea of general contestation was realized in May 1968, the idea also realized its limits. The theory of the exemplary act […] may have gone as far as such a theory or such an act can go.” (McDonough 2004, 18)

However their tools are still useful to us. With the advent of the 21^st century we find ourselves in a new “‘era of the spectacle’ where the site of power has shifted from the exterior screens of simulation to the interior body of the material subject.” (Causey 2006, 179) We are now living in an era of embeddedness.

Technologized cultural systems resist simulating signs of the real to mask the real and instead practice a technique of embeddedness […] which draws attention to a reconstructed material truth and ocular proof that seeks to coerce through a type of shock and awe. The strategy of simulation and spectacle has been extended and fundamentally altered. The linked performances of terror, war, propaganda and consumerism have not fully abandoned the strategies of illusory simulation, but have instead complicated their operation with an image regime and the bodily presence of a material embeddedness. (Causey 2006, 151)

The example drawn by Causey contrasts the illusion of Gulf War I – of cut together clips, narrators, and news packages – to the rolling embedded coverage of Gulf War II. ‘This is happening now’, the spectacle says, ‘there is no room for editing or cutting, we use embedded reporters, there is no room for simulation; this is reality’. In this age of celebrity and self-deluding X factor hopefuls, we no longer only find our desires maintained as needs, we find our dreams regulated too. This corruption of the data-flow of contemporary life extends beyond ‘reality TV’ to 24-hour rolling news, the advent of the ‘real-time’ and ‘social’ web. We are led to believe that the data we receive is live, uncut, and true. Through these tools the spectacle embeds itself in our lives. And in our Technoculture capitalism has a new currency: information. Facebook, Google, Youtube, we are now data packages, not only are we consumers, but we are consumed. It is the ‘interior body of the material subject’ where the battle for subjectivity must now be fought, in our selves.

A heavy task indeed, and a harder one as the remnants of reality are fundamentally altered rather than hidden by the spectacle. But we have a fight-back on our hands. The advent of the social-political online world, the wiki, and the prevalence of online gaming, also points towards a trend in narrative consumption and rebellion – this is the player as protagonist, everyone as editor, this is a gasp, a cry, a demand for the opportunity for us to eschew our bit-parts in the spectacle. To take control, to remake our selves, our surroundings, our ways of seeing.

This is the movement from audience to participant.

A new way of being is starting to emerge, it is imperative to bring the arts to that world to report from it. (Thompson 2009)

The situationists, I suggest, have provided us with the tools to deal with the spectacle, and phenomenology the way of seeing how we are embedded.

Phenomenology was the first movement to focus on the specific conditions of human embeddedness in an environment, and to make visible the phenomenon of the environment itself.  (Moran 2002, 5)

Phenomenology emphasises “world-constituting consciousness” (Moran 2002, 22) – an understanding of world-constituting processes is important in order to examine all aspects of the spectacular world. Art is the realm of the double – of re-representation. Nowhere has this been truer than of the theatre. But it is also true, now, of a new world: the virtual.

In virtual worlds, technology is widely allowing us to reclaim the reporting of our world, to take control over data, our information. Online spaces must be reclaimed, prevented from being colonised. It may currently be a place where our data is bought and sold, but it is also a place where we can take control, trade data on our own terms.

The online world is deeply involved in new trends of narrative and world-constituting. We see echoes in the avatar/online game, of theatre’s actor/play, and on discussion and image boards – we find the void, anonymity. Anonymity is fuelling subversive attempts to opt out of the organisation of myth, to bomb the spectacle. Just as the Angry Brigade of the 60s and 70s

Cultivated an image of a large, diffuse, and unidentifiable collection of dissenters: ‘The AB is the man or woman sitting next to you. They have guns in their pockets and anger in their minds.’

Now we are too many to know each other […]‘THEY COULD NOT JAIL US FOR WE DID NOT EXIST’ (Plant 1992, 126-7)

We now see online spaces such as 4chan and /b/ giving rise to phenomena such as Anonymous, DDoS attacks and defacement of the websites of celebrities, political targets, the Church of Scientology.  They are digital terrorists.

[Anonymous is] the first internet-based superconsciousness. Anonymous is a group, in the sense that a flock of birds is a group. How do you know they’re a group? Because they’re travelling in the same direction. At any given moment, more birds could join, leave, peel off in another direction entirely. (Landers 2008)

Other attempts to break out of the embedded spectacle include Orange Alternative style playful recuperation – subvertising, flashmobs, cultural memes and viral videos. However in the fast paced world of technology, capitalism and the establishment promptly absorb these forms. The flashmob and viral video have been taken on by advertising, and when social networks are used by political subversives, they are quickly infiltrated by virtual Agent Provocateurs – as was seen in the #IranElection Twitter fuelled riots of 2009.

Only Anonymous have resisted recuperation by the spectacle. They are dangerous, racist, misogynistic, righteous and unpredictable by turn. They are all things, they are anyone, they are nothing and they are no one. They embody that of virtual worlds which is made in the void; they do not exist, their potential is everywhere. And as yet they have resisted that which the Angry Brigade succumbed to, the AB could not be caught, but they were labelled ‘terror’. The void with which the AB threatened Italian society was turned into a useful bogeyman for the spectacle:

The spectacle of terrorism provides a socially cohesive common enemy, legitimised needs for vigilance, security, and new forms of police repression, and encourages the opinion that even the faultiest of democracies is superior to the reign of terror. (Plant 1992, 128)

The web and the online ethic also continues to be colonised by the capitalist spectacle. The groups of people on a night out, frozen in wide smiles and pouts, shuddering ever so-slightly as they wait for the flash to go off. ‘It didn’t happen if there aren’t photos of it on Facebook’. They are cultivating digital versions of themselves. Personal data, buying habits, images, memories, thoughts and feelings are entrusted to huge multinational companies and – much more than the goods we make, our money, our time – they trade in pieces of our selves.

So while situationists offer the tools, and phenomenology the way of seeing, it is in theatre that we find world-constituting in its purest expression, and theatre in which we need to find new forms to tackle the spectacle’s colonisation of the self. As the spectacle in our society warps the raw data of contemporary being, theatre too, struggles to maintain its political power. As the corruption runs deeper and deeper, all of the virtual and theatre worlds are compromised and their revolutionary potential smothered.

To preserve their revolutionary potential, these worlds need each other.

Theatre has always been in the business of world-constituting. It could bracket the spectacle and show you a new illusion. And now, with the advent of the player-as-protagonist ethic of online worlds, theatre can bracket the modern spectacle and embed you in other realities.

In the last century the situationists called for the

Invention of a new species of games. The most general aim must be to broaden the nonmediocre portion of life, to reduce its empty moments as much as possible. […] The situationist game stands out from the standard conception of the game by the radical negation of the ludic features of competition and of its separation from the stream of life. (Debord 2004, 45)

This is exactly what Pervasive Games do. Pervasive Gaming is a fluid term for location (often) urban-based games. The Pervasive Gaming collective Hide&Seek describe their work as “social games and playful experiences” (Hide&Seek 2010). They are somewhere between computer games, and the games you used to play as a child, they have also worked with pioneering theatre companies such as Punchdrunk on what they term ‘Multiplatform Immersive Theatre Experiences’ or MITE – using virtual and real worlds, and exploring narrative in the spaces between them.

In this study I am widening the definition of ‘Pervasive Gaming’ to include all performance strategies that involve augmenting personal or environmental reality from a player-as-protagonist perspective.

The playful games of Hide&Seek use a wiki-ethic to create, and run their games and events. Using the web as a place to assemble their ideas, anyone can edit and invent new games for the collective, propose and run new events, and all of the work is available under a free-to-use Creative Commons licence. Likewise they run ‘sandpit’ events – which take a similar approach to beta testing in the world of software development. The games played by Hide&Seek are never played for prizes, and take place in large groups across urban spaces. Every player is an associate artist.

In a classless society, it might be said, there will be no more painters, only situationists who, among other things, make paintings (Debord 2004, 48)

Though the majority of the games are simple and light hearted they represent a détournement of urban space, a reclamation of play and an application of player-as-protagonist ethics.

The player-as-protagonist borrows from the actor of theatre and the avatar of online worlds, allowing the user to play with aspects of the double and the void – being and nothingness – our selves as constructs. The player-as-protagonist brings us back to a truer sense of self, through absence.

Absences – of meaning, participation, reality, and identity – can constitute useful tactics in the struggle to unmask the social and economic relations of contemporary capitalist society. (Plant 1992, 181)

Theatre is death, nothing, life, everything. It is the creation of a world in front of our very eyes.  New theatrical forms like Pervasive Gaming are using digital ethics to take this way of seeing to the subject.

The ego does not believe in the possibility of its death. The unconscious thinks it is immortal. The uncanny experience of the double is death made material, unavoidable, present. (Causey 2006, 18)

To examine life as it is constituted you also need to understand death. Technology, avatars, the spaces theatre traverses between being and suspension of disbelief; there we find death, and also life. 0, 1, 0, 1, every second.

Though these Pervasive Games and events often involve recorded or other technology, which can disengage you from “the power of the double and of illusion, and thereby of the spectre of the corporeal body (death).”(Causey 2006, 98), this is countered by the danger of placing you as the avatar in the world-constituting process. You are sole creator.

Pervasive Games pick us up from our embedded state and allow us to look at ourselves from different angles. They take devices that are often designed to separate us from reality; iPods, GPS units, smart phones, and they use them to bring us into closer contact with the world. Some of the most interesting aspects of Pervasive Gaming is exemplified by the Subtlemob. Based on the idea of secret gatherings of people that the flashmob popularised, but bringing people together quietly, and conspiratorially to walk the narrative of a story.

As if it Were the Last Time was a free a sound walk-come-performance devised by Duncan Speakman and in association with Subtlemob. It took place on a small number of streets near Covent Garden. It was a (performance? Experience? Neither of these words do) for two people. Two days before the event, participants were provided with a map, an mp3, and told to set it going at 6pm.

For each and every person who took part, the experience was theirs. Entirely. And not, in staged theatre, as each audience member receiving the piece from a different perspective. This was each participant doing. The movements, the characters, the gestures, and the touch of someone’s hand on a shoulder, were all completely yours. Of your making.

Conventional suspension of disbelief – the time and credence that you pay into conventional, staged performance – pales into comparison to the weight of belief that you pour into this kind of experience. Traditional theatre is by no means irrelevant, the video game didn’t kill the cinema, theatre is powerful, but this is a form that is powerful in new and important ways. A piece of staged theatre is a rip in the space-time continuum, it is a hundred different hours, poured into one, it is a hundred held breaths, a hundred moments of people turning one thing, into another. As if it Were the Last Time was one whole moment, it was the heat of one breath, it was noticing how the ripples of rain in a puddle shake the light of shop fronts in time to a piece of music. It was stories, yours, of others, and your reflection in the window. It was one voice, lost, and your own, quiet.

You were embedded in a new world instead of conspiring with another.

Time comes to us first and foremost as an individual lifetime. (Fortier 2002, 41)

The phenomenological way of seeing pays great attention to time. Life is not Aristotelian, we need new temporal strategies in our storytelling if we are to constitute the wholeness of worlds. In As if it Were the Last Time the narrative was fractured, the one solid piece of information you were given was that the piece was in memory of another. However instead of talking about the person lost, it asked you to find yourself there as if it were your last half hour.  It was the story of a person seeing the world as they’d never see it again, you heard thoughts that occurred to them as they saw the same things you did, the memories prompted. The narrative built like a collage, like a barrage of images and sounds and ideas that didn’t fit, and then you realised they were building a whole person. And it hurt. And it was wonderful. You felt like you were falling off a building. Or maybe ‘you’ didn’t, maybe only I did.

This was a piece truly about the thickness of experience. It went all the way around the back. It also talked about ‘drifting’, asked you to dérive–find places that made you feel certain ways.

There were moments when it faltered, when things didn’t fit with what you were hearing, but you were seeking, willing them to get back on track, because this was you – your belief at risk. This wasn’t an actor fluffing their lines, it was you, as an avatar of the narrative.

[An avatar is] a machine that is attached to the psychology of its user. From within that machine the driver can peek out, squinting through alien eyes, and find a new world. And, oddly, the driver can also look into himself, as if gazing into his navel, and find a new landscape inside as well (Meadows 2008, 8)

I wrote on my blog after returning from the experience:

“Those thirty minutes were the most vivid, most high contrast of my week. It was true augmented reality, and I want to take my friends and loved ones back to share it. It hurts that I can’t. But that’s kind of what being is, isn’t it?”

‘A work of art born on the stage lives only for a moment, and no matter how beautiful it may be it cannot be commanded to stay with us’ (Fortier 2002, 49)

Works Cited

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Auslander, Philip. Liveness, Performance in a Mediatized Culture. New York: Routledge, 1999.

Benjamin, Walter. “The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction.” In Illuminations, by Walter Benjamin. London: Fontana Press, 1992.

Causey, Matthew. Theatre and Performance in a Digital Culture, from simulation to Embeddedness. Oxon: Routledge, 2006.

Debord, Guy. “Report in the Construction of Situations.” In Guy Debord and the Situationist Internatinal, edited by Tom McDonough. Massachusetts: MIT Press, 2004.

Debord, Guy. “The Great Sleep and its Clients.” In Guy Debord and the Situationist International, edited by Tom McDonough. Massachusetts: MIT Press, 2004.

Debord, Guy. “The Situationist and the New Forms of Action in Politics or Art.” In Guy Debord and the Situationist International, edited by Tom McDonough. Massachusetts: MIT Press, 2004.

Dusek, Val. Philosophy of Technology. Oxford: Blackwell Publishing Ltd., 2006.

Fortier, Mark. Theory/Theatre. London: Routledge, 2002.

Haydon, Andrew. The year in theatre: trends of 2009. December 30, 2009. http://www.guardian.co.uk/stage/theatreblog/2009/dec/30/theatre-trends-2009 (accessed January 1, 2010).

Hide&Seek. Hide and Seek – Projects. January 6, 2010. http://hideandseekfest.co.uk/projects (accessed January 6, 2010).

Husserl, E. “Introduction to the Logical Investigations.” In The Phenomenology Reader, edited by Dermot Moran and Timothy Mooney. New York: Routledge, 2002.

Husserl, Edmund. “Consciousness as Intentional Experience.” In The Phenomenology Reader, edited by Dermot Moran and Timothy Mooney. New York: Routledge, 2002.

Landers, Chris. Serious Business: Anonymous Takes on Scientology. March 2, 2008. http://www.citypaper.com/columns/story.asp?id=15543 (accessed July 3, 2008).

“Editorial Notes: Priority Communication.” In Guy Debord and the Situationist International, by Tom McDonough. Massachusetts: MIT Press, 2004.

McDonough, Tom. “Editorial Notes: The Meaning of Decay in Art.” In Guy Deb ord and the Situationist International, edited by Tom McDonough. Massachusetts: MIT Press, 2004.

McDonough, Tom. “Introduction.” In Guy Debord and the Situatinist International, edited by Tom McDonough. Massachusetts: MIT Press, 2004.

McDonough, Tom. “Situationist Space.” In Guy Debord and the Situationist International, edited by Tom McDonough. Massachusetts: MIT Press, 2004.

Meadows, Mark Stephen. I, Avatar, the Culture and Consequences of Having a Second Life. Berkley, CA: New Riders, 2008.

Moran, Dermot. “Introduction.” In The Phenomenology Reader, edited by Dermot Moran and Timothy Mooney. New York: Routledge, 2002.

Plant, Sadie. The Most Radical Gesture, the Situationist International in a Postmodern Age. London: Routledge, 1992.

Reinach, Adolf. “Concerning Phenomenology.” In The Phenomenology Reader, edited by Dermot Moran and Timothy Mooney. New York: Routledge, 2002.

Roach, Joseph R. “Introduction to Phenomenology and Hermeneutics .” In Critical Theory and Performance, edited by Janelle G Reinelt and Joseph R Roach. Michigan: University of Michigan Press, 1992.

Scheler, Max. “The Being of the Person.” In The Phenomenology Reader, edited by Dermot Moran and Timothy Mooney. New York: Routledge, 2002.

States, Bert O. Great Reckonings in Little Rooms, On the Phenomenology of Theater. Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1985.

States, Bert O. “The Phenomenological Attitude.” In Critical Theory and Performance, edited by Janelle G Reinelt and Joseph R Roach. Michigan: University of Michigan Press, 1992.

Subtlemob. Subtlemob. http://subtlemob.com (accessed 10 06, 2009).

Thompson, Bill. Speech at the Shift Happens 2.0 Arts and Technology Conference. (June 30, 2009).

Tsakos, Natasha. “Natasha Tsakos’ Multimedia Theatrical Adventure.” TED Talks. http://www.ted.com/talks/natasha_tsakos_multimedia_theatrical_adventure.html (accessed October 6, 2009).

Various. “Extracts from Letters to the Situationist International.” In Guy Debord and the Situationist International, by Tom McDonough. Massachusetts: MIT Press, 2004.

—. Pervasive Game. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pervasive_game (accessed January 6, 2010).

The Situationists, Phenomenology and Pervasive Gaming: New Narrative Strategies. by Hannah Nicklin is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 2.0 UK: England & Wales License.
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Situationist Space, and Pervasive Gaming

In scattered and barely noticed ways, the desire to construct one’s own life was shaping the twentieth century p.10

Those who have been following my tweets over the past two weeks are so will have seen that one of the places I’ve started reading for my PhD is contemporary philosophy. Now there’s a degree to which you could argue philosophy has nothing to do with the advent of technology and the arts. And that’s the degree to which you’d be wrong. Philosophy takes a step back from the world, from society, and looks at what it is to be. It is the science of thought, it brought us into the age of enlightenment, it showed us why we felt empty after religion became irrelevant and it shows us how we’ve tried to fill that gap. The two main movements I’m looking at to kick off with are the situationists, and phenomenology. One looks at the reclamation of physical space from the spectacle of advance capitalism, and the other attempts to form a science of subjective realities.

OK, it may not be sounding strictly relevant yet.

I believe in 3D thought – I think that theory is nothing without practice, and also, that practice is nothing if not situated – to some degree, within theory. I don’t necessarily mean the dry theory of academia, anything, even art for arts sake is situated in theory – in thought – by design. I’m going to look at the situationists here, because they have everything to do with an event I’m attending tomorrow – a city wide pervasive gaming event held by Hide&Seek.

The situationists came out of nothing. Literally. They developed out of Dadaism, which, in reaction to the horror of the world wars, made art out of nothing, and nothing out of art. Dada had seen life treated as nothing, the situationists had seen the beginning of this nothing being replaced with a bigger, newer, shinier absence: consumerism.

If society is organized around consumption, one participates in social life as a consumer; the spectacle produces spectators, and thus protects itself from questioning. It induces passivity rather than action, contemplation rather than thinking, and a degradation of life into materialism. […] Desires are degraded or displaced into needs and maintained as needs. p.8

The situationists talk about a life built on spectacle, a virtual world built of everything we’re told we should think, say and feel. It’s not just the tools of consumerism such as “advertising, or propaganda, or television. It is a world. The spectacle as we experience it, but fail to perceive it, “it is not a collection of images, but a social relationship between people, mediated by images”” p.9

Our society is dominated by the spectacle- by the spin of modern politics, by the narrative of modern life, by the dreams we’re given and happily ever afters we’re taught to crave. The situationists saw this. But they also saw that we are united.

Foreclosing the construction of one’s own life, advanced capitalism had made almost everyone a member of a new proletariat, and thus a potential revolutionary. p.11

The solution? The reclamation of our world, the subversion of the spaces dominated by narratives not of our own making. They suggested two modes of change: the dérive, and détournement.

The détournement is simple, it is the subversion of cultural artefacts, the kind that feed the spectacle, turned upside down to highlight the edifice of our culture:

The dérive is an actual reclamation of the space around us. Think of your life, your day to day life as a map. Draw on that map your place of work, your home, and the place where you shop. How often do you move out of that triangle? When you move in space, how much of it do you actually see? How much of it is owned and loaned out to others? How does it make you feel? Why does it matter? This is our environment, why do we only think it’s important when we go on holiday?

When on a dérive you attempt to step aside from class, gender, and the crowd, fragmenting and disrupting social constructions. “the dérive replaced the figure of the voyeur with that of the walker” p.255

If all the world is a continually remade spectacle, we need to remake our own world every day to counter that.

Why is this relevant to theatre and digital tech?

The role of the “public”, if not passive at least a walk-on, must ever diminish, while the share of those who cannot be called actors but, in a new meaning of the term, “livers,” will increase. p.47

This is the movement from audience to participant.

I believe that the advent of the social online world, and the prevalence of online gaming, points towards a trend in narrative consumption – this is the player as protagonist, this is a gasp, a cry, a demand for the opportunity for us to eschew our bit-parts in the spectacle. To remake ourselves, our surroundings. This is something both theatre, and technology does every day.

I believe that art and technology combined are best placed to reveal to us our society, and the places that it is able to go. I also think it is absolutely necessary that they do so.

Those who mistrust the machine and those who glorify it show the same incapacity to utilize it. Machine work and mass production offer unheard-of possibilities for creation, and those who are able to place these possibilities at the service of a daring imagination will be my creators of tomorrow. p.75

This was written over 40 years ago, and yet speaks almost exactly of the main driving force of my thesis.

There are people who say that liveness is everything, and there are people who say that soon, everything will be virtual, we will have remade our flawed world into something new.  I think they are both wrong.

There is a lot of buzz in the live performance world about live streaming at the moment, and although I do believe it a really useful device in making cultural content ubiquitous, it is much less interesting to me, because all you’re doing is replacing one frame, with another.

“A new way of being is starting to emerge, it is IMPERATIVE to bring the arts to that world” to report from it. billt at #shifthappens Jun 30th 2009

I don’t think people who resist crashing online worlds with live performance fear change, I think they don’t understand why it is relevant – that’s where I think the discussion needs to lie; sure it’s possible, but is it valuable? What is valuable? What should performance do? Live performance does not need to be ‘harnessed’ by online worlds, but rather to continue to evolve to reflect the changing experience of people who are living between worlds, and inventing new kinds of storytelling.

At the same time there is a move towards using ethics of digital storytelling in a live context, which shouldn’t be dismissed for all the interesting things that can be produced with live storytelling in a digital one. A brilliant example of this is the ‘pervasive gaming’ of companies such as Hide&Seek- they replace passive audience with single or multi player, often using digital tech as interface/tool in the work. They apply an open source ethic to developing their pieces, and they are all about the player as protagonist – taking gaming ethics to a live world.

I don’t think liveness is all, but there’s no way it should be dismissed. Likewise there are different ways of using tech in delivering an event online – straight streaming is very good at amplifying content – but social media tools are also excellent for amplifying a process and an experience.

Art exists to test societies’ ideas, to grapple with memories, to imagine futures. I believe performance needs to be at the forefront of this, exploring online identity, experience, ethics.  We, in the arts, need to stop trying to catch up with the rest of the world, and start looking ahead. We need to challenge new ways of being, and we need to redefine and question concepts of virtuality and liveness. The most interesting places are the gaps in between, and you cannot examine one without the other.

Whoever constructs situations […] “by bringing his movements to bear on external nature and transforming it … transforms his own nature at the same time” p.91

We need to shine a light through the cracks in our realities. We understand that so much is constructed, why not now consider how we can reconstruct them?

Tomorrow I shall be taking part in Hide&Seek’s Sandpit tour. The event is free to attend (though you need to book) and is being held in the City of Nottingham. All throughout the City of Nottingham. Open-source built city-wide games are brought to players, who choose their game, and play their narrative, reclaiming the city space for invented leisure.  Here’s a video from Hide&Seek, talking about their work with pervasive gaming:

I will write some more (probably not as much [!]) after I’ve been to the event.

The act of walking is to the urban system what the speech act is to language p.290

In the meantime, next time you’re in a space, any space, and you have some time. Let go. Let go of where you’re going, and who you are in relation to it, let the rush and the characters and the adverts fade by. Drift.