8 July, 201629 July, 2016

Notes on the black box scenario Inside myself, outside myself

This is a short talk on a black box larp that I gave at Larpwriter Summer School in Lithuania. The text is more precise than the video…

I will present a scenario played at the festival Black Box Copenhagen in 2014. The project was initiated by Nina Runa Essendrop and Marie Holm-Andersen under the poetic but generic title Inside myself, outside myself. This larp is not presented because it had a fancy location or visual appeal, quite the opposite. It was just people in a black box. So I have no pictures from the larp.

Nina and Marie gathered a dozen of larp writers and performance artists to create a new and playable scenario for the black box festival audience among who most were larpers, but some were not. There were many challenges in this venture, like how to come up with ideas, share them and weed out stuff? The biggest problem might have been this: how to conceive a scenario to a random number of participants, making them ready to play it and letting them play it, within a 2 hour time frame.

A general rule of participation design is that the audience, the participants, must know the rules and the premiss of the scenario in order to engage with it. Otherwise you run the risk that they default to passive observers. I’ve seen it happen a lot of times. Now, there are obviously other approaches. Some of them apparent in computer game design. When you start playing Super Mario there is no explanation for where to go and how survive. You learn the rules of the game by playing it and exploring the boundaries and the possibilities of interacting with the game is a part of the enjoyment and possibly also a key part of the aesthetic experience.

One participant in Inside myself, outside myself, Simon James Pettitt, later wrote in a game report that he had expected an introduction or a workshop starting things off, but there were none. So how did it start? Well when the participants entered the black box the designers, now performers, were spread out in the room frozen in different sculptural positions. The participants roamed around in the room and looked at the ”sculptures”.

I think there are two things to learn from the design of the scenario. The first thing being the game design concept ”call for action” the second thing would be the idea of emergence – how patterns, movements, situations can emerge from some simple rules.

To simplify we set up 3 acts for the scenario. In the first act the sculptures functioned as ”calls for action”. Every sculpture worked as a kind of puzzle. The participants soon realized that the sculptures could come alive, become animated, if you approached it in the right way. So for example my position was kneeling, holding an invisible object in front of me. I could only be activated if someone put their shoe between my hands. Then I would untie the shoe and take it off. This was the only thing I could do in act 1. So eventually all the sculptures were unlocked by the participants and some of the simple tasks they carried out created chain reactions, so all the shoes ended up in a proper line and so on. The mixing desk communication style fader was definitely physical rather than verbal.

I don’t know if a less game oriented audience would have unlocked the sculptures. They might have. I think only play testing can answer such uncertainties.

The second and third act of the scenario worked through emergence. Emergence is something that happens when a collective of actors or objects follow a small set of rules from which a complicated or unforeseen situation or pattern appears. In the second act the sculptures turned into something closer to machines or robots and they could learn from the participants by copying their actions, what they said, how they behaved. That created some bizarre feedback loops where everything that happened echoed around the room. In the third act the intelligence of the machines were updated a second time and they could start to teach the participants what they knew. These small guidelines generated a lot of interaction and produced some kind of aesthetic consistency although the scenario turned out generally chaotic. Simon describes it as a ”strange living machine” in his game report.

Hopefully this case study of Inside myself, outside myself can give some hints on what is possible to do with small means on a short notice. To sum it up the scenario used calls for action as a means to teach an unknowing, uninformed audience about how to engage with the scenario. It continued to create interaction by simple rules – such as ”you can repeat what you see or hear”. Different situations emerged from these rules.

15 February, 2015

Knudepunkt 2015 Keynote on bodies in live action role-play

Transcription of a talk given at Knudepunkt 2015, February 14th.

Immersion is the excrement of action

I have been asked to do this talk on the subject of bodies in live action role-playing, which I’m very happy about since the body has turned centre stage in larp development and design. I have previously together with Tova Gerge, tried to examine and understand the body in live role-playing from a very simple but for many years overlooked fact – the character and the player share body. I think that is true also for table-top or freeform role-playing games, where roleplay happens through the voices of bodies. When we invocate a character, when we adjust our tone, when we invite an alien fictitious voice to appear in the cavities of our body. This is still the premiss for what I have to say today. I think Ane Marie Andesson will develop on that fact later during this session.

I titled this talk Immersion is the excrement of action, but I have over the last week realised that there are no immersionists around any more so I may be pushing at open doors. Also Martin Ericsson covered parts of this already yesterday. Anyhow what I meant by that title is that our bodies and actions has a major part to play in role-playing. I do think we are starting to understand larp pretty well from a social and psychological perspective. But maybe we are lacking a bit from the perspective of the body and maybe we have over-used psychological concepts to understand what we are doing and exaggerated our mental and cognitive capacities. One example of that would be immersion. We often describe role-playing as an activity where we immerse into a world where we are somebody else. And I don’t doubt that immersion actually exists. But I don’t think that it happens through an active psychological effort but rather as a bi-product of our bodily activities.

It’s not the case that we first immerse into our character and through immersion decide how to act within the fictitious world. It usually work the opposite way around – we act with our bodies as our characters, and immersion happens to us. Such an understanding would work along the lines of 17th century philosopher Pascal – First you go to church and you kneel in front of the cross, then you start believing in God. According to the same logic you can start believing in your character when you act it.

Live Action Play

This reasoning made me, as a thought experiment, to put a preliminary parenthesis around the R in our beloved but clunky abbreviation LARP, LA(R)P. (This is what any obscure leninist party, so why not) What if role-playing is not the core activity in our culture, our medium, or at least, if we pretended that it was not. If we think about what we do as Live Action Play.

In larp discourse we have lended a lot of concepts from psychology but also from theatre. But thinking larp from a bodily non-role point of view could enable us to venture in two other “opposite” but also related fields – somatics (dealing with the body as experienced from within) and dance or choreography. We have used theatre concepts to elevate what we do from a subgenre of tabletop role-playing to a cultural and artistic medium, which I think is fine, but we payed a price to make this liaison with theatre which is more clear to me now than ever before.

Stories guiding play

Theatre works according to dramaturgy, escalation of conflict, tropes and representation. These more or less conscious forms, ideals, ideologies of drama enable our improvisation. The better we know how drama happens, the better role-play. This is the idea behind fate-play, etc. I have been a proponent of such a meta-conscious, theatre-oriented player. Looking behind, planning ahead. Anyone who has followed my thought on larp have noticed that. When I started to write about larp i wanted to explore the aspect of collective storytelling. The idea was that the story was the only framework that could enable, encompass, hold such a diverse activity as larping.

It’s a valid line of thought but also very limiting. From a player point of view I have many times been in the situation where I’ve played in a scenario and known what I should do to make a good story, a good scene that underlines the overarching theme of the scenario – but something has held me back. I think I’ve developed a kind of resistance to subjecting to certain kinds of narrative, reproducing the tropes and dramatic conflicts that we have internalized from Hollywood drama, Harry Potter, Battlestar Galactica, you name it.

But also in the case of politically conscious scenarios everything change once I start thinking them through the body. The aesthetic qualities of the larps change. For example, a scenario about a prison camp, or any other kind of camp, is usually framed as an exploration or critical inquiry of a power system and so on – but all I can think is – why does our bodies enjoy institutional violence so much that we enact it over and over again? It is, at least as much bodily enjoyment as mental critical inquiry involved so a question we might need in the future is Why are we organising our bodies to perform these systems?

Starting from the body

So if we don’t tune in to the pace of the story to get the action going what do we have left to hold on to? We can of course still have the rules, the agreements, the framing, the social state of exception – what in dance theory is called a score. But pacing and rhythm does not have to follow dramatic or narrative principles, they might as well flow like music or dance and repetition might be just as valid as development. We can also, and here I might sound like a hippie, listen to the pacing of our own bodies, adjust improvisation to the rhythm of our breath, waves of hormones or the beat of the heart.

And speaking of hippie – I would like to remind you that two great participatory cultures that originated from the American hippie era and later spread to the Nordic countries 1. role-playing games and 2. dance improvisation. And to me it’s fascinating when they are coming together.

So from a scenario-writing point of view, or an artistic point of view, I would be happy to make more space for scenarios where the primary goal is not to represent psychological and social conflicts between people who we are not.

But I don’t even think what I’m saying here is new. I think these kinds of scenarios where the role is secondary or even non-existing, happens all the time. I just want to underline that it happens, we already to it. We just have to acknowledge it and develop it and not marginalize it because the holy R of LARP is fading.

One way of developing our form would be to peak at the dance field. Now improvised dance has a lot in common with roleplaying, it happens in shared spaces, with certain social agreements and collective improvisation. But it has different aesthetic premisses.

First of all dance is generally non-verbal, in contrast to role-playing, which has been more influenced by the talking-heads of theatre and tv. This does not mean that there is no possibility to use the voice in dance, but maybe one would use it for other purposes.

Presence and abstraction

Another key to “dance” through a larp would be to focus on the present moment, rather than the future and the past of the story. This means a scenario can be discontinuous and that the responsibility of the player is not about creating historical or narrative consistency, nor to create fertile ground for drama in the future, but to be there and listen to what is actually going on at that point in time in between the bodies at hand.

And I think it’s great that artists within the field of dance and choreography are starting to show up on slides here on main stage. Brody Condon mentioned the works of Lygia Clark, Anna Halprin and Tino Sehgal and I just want to underline that he is right in that we, as larpers, could have great benefits of exploring their work, their scores, rituals, workshops and art works.

Another tendency in dance is that it is abstract. And what do we mean by abstract? Well in art theory abstract art is considered to be object in their own right. An abstract painting does not need a symbolic relationship to anything in the human liveable world. It often seeks to create it’s own universe, with a more or less coherent alien logic. That is not just a story universe, but something which we are unable to attach meaning to according to the logic of our standard social reality.

So if one think “oh, that’s a bad painting, I can’t see what it represents”, then it’s hard to appreciate abstract art. The same goes for dance. When we see contemporary dancers move on stage we can not approach it with the question of “What are they trying to tell? What is the hidden, encrypted story? What are they representing?” because then we’ll not understand that what we see in front of us is, in itself what is important – the activity, the mobilisation of and relationships between bodies that are there.

Being or becoming?

Thus, dance is not a culture of representation, it is not a culture of being in a character, being this or being that, it is a practice of becoming – becoming flesh, becoming machine, becoming animal, becoming other, becoming alien, becoming avatar or god, becoming minor or cellular.

I think this kind of expanded or alternate thinking on larp has benefited a lot from access to the black boxes that Martin Nielsen talked about yesterday. Just the fact that we start thinking from a dark void, rather than from a physical setting (be it a forest or a castle) has done something to how we create scenarios. And while we populate the black boxes and bring them to life, we should somewhere keep in mind that these spaces were created for the non-hierarchical, physical, improvised and bodily performance culture of the 60ths. They paved the way for what we can do today.

To conclude, I just want to say, that there are, still, a thousand new scenarios that remains to be created, where we can come together to live, act and play.

Thank you.

3 December, 201427 January, 2015

I’m back…

My web history and life and former blog at Interacting Arts went off-line. I tried to import the content to this site but all the images are gone and there is probably plenty of dead links and bugs et c. I lost everything I published 2014 in the process. Maybe I’ll make up for that later…

17 January, 201424 June, 2015

Notes on Punchdrunk’s The Drowned Man from an interaction design pow

Visiting London I took the oppurtunity to go to Punchdrunk’s epic show The Drowned Man which encompass some 20.000 sqm on 4 floors, 30 actors, a bar, et c. I will not summarise the whole experience here, there is plenty of reviews to read online. What I want to do is to share some thoughts on the interaction design.

Following the definitions of Participatory Arts (Deltagarkultur 2008, yet to be published in english), I would consider The Drowned Man an all-encompassing spectatory arts show. It’s neither interactive, in the sense of that one can alter the story line, nor participatory, in that it doesn’t encourage interaction between audience members. Let me quote:

The all-encompassing Gesamtkunstwerk, on the other hand, aims to create a total experience where everything that can be sensed is dictated by the artwork. All undesirable stimuli are firmly expelled. The all-encompassing work is no doubt by necessity multi-disciplinary, or at least multi-medial, but also requires a spatial dimension to manifest. The stimuli encapsulate the receiver in order to generate a “total environment of the senses” – the world of the Gesamtkunstwerk.

That pretty much nails the aesthetics of The Drowned Man and it’s all fine to do such a show. But if one was interested in making some interactive or participatory design based on the it, how could one do it?

First of all: Most of the rules that are presented as we enter the magic circle have the purpose to disable interaction between audience members as well as between audience and performers. First of all the masks, which covers the whole face and secondly the rule not to speak. Thirdly, they asked you to leave your company and explore the space alone. I can see why you want to do that, following the definition of a Gesamtkunstwerk above. If the audience were present and social they could ruin the mystical mood at the set. So, how to stay within the aesthetics, but still enable interaction.

What I would propse is a simple hand-sign system containing 3 different meanings, that would be presented to the audience from start. This would definetly need some playtesting, but here goes:

Pointing. The meaning being to index something interesting that you want to show somebody else. After all, the scenography and prop design was amazing, and the story came through by finding props and reading letters than by watching the performers.
Showing your palm. The meaning would be – take my hand, let’s go together. Let’s go for an adventure together. This could make up for the fact that you are alone and anonymous through most of the show.
Stop. I don’t want to be part of whatever you are trying to do right now. Whether it’s a performer or audience member approaching you it’s safe to now how to say no. This would also make people more courageous.

I could think of plenty of other approaches that one could mix up with these basic interaction patterns. Another thing I thought of was that the performed scenes basicly can be divided in three different categories: sexy-dance, fighting-dance and ritual dance. Especially in the more ritualistic parts it would be easy to give the audience a more active part. There are also club-dance dance-scenes where it makes no sense to leave the audience out.

Furthermore one could add more game design to the story, but that’s a bit to complicated to cover in a short blog post.

6 December, 201325 January, 2015

Förrädarens afton

Betrayer’s Banquet är en exklusiv middagsbjudning med “fångens dilemma” som centralt spelelement. Idén är utvecklad av Original Content London och förra helgen hade jag chansen att vara med.

Långbord på banketten.

På en ruffig bakgata i östra London öppnar en huvbeklädd man en liten dörr. Han lockar in de huttrande besökarna en och en. I inbjudan har vi fått ett lösenord som jag viskar och släpps in. Där inne dukas ett långbord upp för 48 personer. På väg in får en dra ett kort ur en hög. Kortet avgör var en placeras längs det långa bordet. Jag drar klöver nio och hamnar i mitten.

Kvällen är inramad som en initiationsrit till en frimurarloge eller liknande. Alla servitörer och andra ser är klädda i svarta kåpor. Ritualmästaren bestämmer vilka som får spela. En spelar mot den som sitter mittemot och det går till såhär: Var och en lägger en bricka på bordet. På ena sidan finns det en bägare, som symboliserar förtroende, på den andra sidan en dolk, som får symbolisera föräderi.
Om båda samarbetar så får båda flytta 5 platser upp, mot den goda maten och festens elit. Om båda förråder varandra så får de flytta 5 stolar neråt, där det serveras gröt, fågelfötter och fiskhuvuden. Om den ena väljer samarbete, men den andra förräderi så får den godtrogne flytta ned 10 stolar och förrädaren flytta upp 10 stolar. Upplägget gör det väldigt vanskligt att lita på den som en spelar mot. Förrädare behöver aldrig riskera mer än att flytta ner 5 stolar, men har allt att vinna. De samarbetsvilliga kan åka på pumpen ordentligt.

Fågelfötter vid bordets nedre del.

Spelet skapade en spännande social dynamik. Även om det är speltekniskt bättre att förråda så kan det vara svårt etiskt, även om allt är på lek. De som var bäst på att spela övertygade först sin motspelare om att samarbeta för att tillsammans flytta uppåt, för att sedan förråda dem. Det krävs ju visst mod för det. Om en ska hårddra det hamnade individualisterna i topp och lite softare men naivare personer (som jag själv) hamnade i botten. Stämningen var lekfull, trots de laddade situationer som uppstod varje gång det blev dags att lägga brickan på bordet.

10 October, 201325 January, 2015

Medvetandet är en muskel – minimalism i 60-talsdansen

Jag läste precis koreografen och dansaren Yvonne Rainers artikel ”The Mind is a Muscle” i samband med en kurs om kropp och rörelse på Södertörn. Nedan följer en summering och lite tankar om människa och maskin.

Artikeln är en sorts undersökning eller beskrivning av Rainers verk Trio A (The Mind is a Muscle) och Trio A. I förordet, skrivet i slutet av 90-talet, långt efter själva artikeln från 1966 gör hon vissa anmärkningar. Hon ursäktar sig för historisk närsynthet och en onödig fixering vid ”stora” män i konsten. Hennes ärende är hursomhelst att försöka begripa dansens utveckling under 60-talet i relation till minimalistisk konst och skulptur. Förordet fortsätter med en beskrivning av alla de sammanhang som Trio A användes i under de följande åren, hur den blev en politisk performance genom att dansas av nakna kroppar, blott insvepta i den amerikanska flaggan – en protest mot arresteringar av personer som ”degraderat” stjärnbaneret. Det finns någon sorts glädje i hur koreografin mångfaldigats sedan premiären och fått sitt eget liv, oberoende av Rainers enskilda kropp.

Så till själva artikeln, en ”kvasiundersökning av minimalistiska tendenser” som alltså skrivs samma år som hon gör Trio A (The Mind is a Muscle). Den börjar med en jämförande uppställning mellan å ena sidan objekt (skulptur och konst), å andra sidan tendenser i samtida dans. De första sju punkterna består av kvalitéer som elimineras eller minimeras. De kommande sju av kvalitéer som ersätter de föregående. Det en strävar bortifrån i minimalistisk konst är kvalitéer som konstnärens handrörelser, hierarkiska relationer och illusionism, vilket på dansområdet skulle kunna motsvaras av frasering, utveckling mot klimax och performance. Fram träder en annan sorts estetik som inom konsten kretsar kring fabrikstillverkning, enhetliga former och enkelhet, en estetik som i dansen går att föreställa sig som vad Reiner kallar energijämlikhet, jämlikhet mellan kroppens olika delar och mänsklig skala. Hon är själv tvekande inför att göra den här typen av uppställningar och generaliseranden, men verkar tycka att det är värt det för att få grepp om sin konstnärliga praktik. Hon påpekar också att själva minimerandet av någonting behandlar detta något som ett problem och aktiverar det därigenom som intresseområde.

Rainer beskriver dansens kvalitéer utifrån energiomvandlingar snarare än kroppsliga arrangemang. I Trio A söker hon ett kontinuerligt rörelseflöde, vilket dock inte betyder att dansarens energiomsättning är konstant. Kontinuiteten finns i hur rörelsen uppfattas utifrån, inte inne i dansarens kropp. Den jämna energinivån ser hon som en uppgörelse med västerländsk dans, som ofta organiserats runt utbrott av maximal energi i början av en fras, för att sedan följas av återhämtning. Sökandet efter klimax i dansen betraktar hon som överdrivet dramatisk och onödig.

Den minimalistiska dansen lämnar även idén om dansaren som någon sorts övermänniska med teknisk virtuositet. Hon tar upp hur någon som skrev om Judson Theatre (som var en viktig scen i New York) frågar varför konstnärerna där är så mycket sig själva på scenen. Rainer vill snarare beskriva det som att dansaren blir en neutral doer, en görare som skulle kunna vara vem som helst och som därför inte behöver förstärkas eller iscensättas med scenkostym och liknande effekter. Dansen intresserar sig för de vardagliga rörelser som de flesta kroppar förmår: stå, gå, springa, äta, bära, röra eller bli rörd av ett objekt, till skillnad från balettens våldsamma hopp grand jeté som inte kan göras utan måste dansas.

Samtidigt kräver Rainers dans en del av sin görare – rörelsens kontinuitet, bristen på pauser och jämställandet av kroppens olika delar. Rörelsen är abstrakt, den föreställer inget, samtidigt har den en energinivå som hon jämför med att resa sig ur en stol eller gå ner för trapporna. Denna ”självklara” intensitet är dock en illusion, även den minimalistiska dansen döljer något, nämligen hur kroppens måste arbeta med olika intensitet för att uppnå något som ser ut som ett jämnt flöde. Detta får mig att undra över om minimalismen verkligen rör sig på en ”mänsklig skala” – här framträder ju snarare än maskinestetik. Rörelsen blir genom repetitionen till objekt. Rainer själv skriver att effekten blir en uppvisning som är mer lik arbete än vad vi traditionellt tänker på som en föreställning.

22 September, 201325 January, 2015

Bloggen 3 år! Topp 5, medmera

Jag har nu bloggat mer eller mindre aktivt i tre år. Sedan hösten 2010 har jag postat över 150 inlägg och fått närmare 10.000 läsare, vilket känns fint med tanke på hur smala många av texterna är.

Ambitionen här är ju i första hand att formulera mig kring olika konstnärliga och spelorienterade praktiker som jag sysslar med. Vikten av att reflektera över handlandet och dokumentera olika faser i den skapande processen känns lika viktigt som någonsin förut. Jag hoppas att idéerna och erfarenheterna som kraffsas ner här kan komma till nytta för andra som är intresserade av deltagarkultur. Senast jag fick bekräftelse på det var när konstnären Hamish MacPherson hörde av sig för att han baserat ett verk skapat för brittiska parlamentet på dokumentationen av experimentet An Infinite Scenario.

En del texter och material kommer nog att hamna hos Nyxxx i framtiden, eftersom jag jobbar aktivt med avatarprojeten i den konstellationen men även Interacting Arts har en liten återuppståndelse i det att vi översatt Deltagarkultur till engelska och just nu är ute på jakt efter förlag med goda internationella distributionskanaler.

Topp 5 lästa inlägg

To be continued…

19 September, 2013

Om publiken i handling på Teaterrummet

Jag och Ebba Petrén har skrivit en ny text:

För den som önskar bjuda in publiken i scenrummet uppstår nya möjligheter och problem. Vilka strategier ska användas för att göra vana och ovana teaterbesökare trygga att ta steget in i en gemensam iscensättning. Skådespelare tränar i flera år för att känna sig bekväma i teaterrummet, men publiken har inte fått den hjälpen och kommer utan förberedelser. De söker stimulans men är ofta obekväma med att sätta sin egen tillvaro på spel. Teaterrummet har aldrig varit en plats där publik och skådespelare kan mötas på lika villkor.

Läs vidare här: “Publik i handling” publicerad på Göteborgs stadsteaters forum Teaterrummet.

22 July, 201325 January, 2015

Byrån och agenten – enkelt verklighetsspel

Scenariot testades på lekklubben i Malmö. Det baseras lite på en avatarövning som jag och Ebba Petrén ägnat oss åt. Det här skrev jag fram under en varm eftermiddag tillsammans med Thom Kiraly och Petter Karlsson.

”Byråns kärnvärden är nyfikenhet, kamratskap, integritet och informationsfrihet. Är det förstått?”

Förberedelser

Spelet är gjort för en park. Vi spelade i Malmö, Folkets park. Det fungerar (någorlunda) för 2 eller flera spelare.
Spelet kräver att alla har fungerande mobiltelefoner. Gärna med handsfree.
Ladda ner PDF med instruktioner till Agent respektive Byrå. Skriv ut så att det räcker till alla.

Instruktioner till deltagarna

Det här är mer av en lek än ett spel, vilket deltagarna bör känna till. Deltagarna bör inte känna till instruktionerna i breven på förhand.
Bestäm hur lång tid ni spelar så att ni kan återsamlas. Förslagsvis runt 30 minuter. Om ni tröttnar eller mobilerna slutar funka så återgå till startpunkten.

Hälften skriver upp sina telefonnummer och lägger i en hatt. De blir Agenter.

Agenterna får varsitt agentbrev och instruktion om att gå ut någonstans i parken och vänta på ett samtal från Byrån.
De andra hälften får ett byrå-manus och drar ett telefonnummer ur hatten. Även de får sprida sig i parken och ringer upp sin Agent efter att de läst sitt brev.

Erfarenheter

Scenariot är skissartat och kan förbättras, men deltagarna hade väldigt kul! Mycket av spelet för byrån kretsar kring att smyga på sin agent, medan spelet för agenterna handlar om att följa de märkliga instruktionerna och klura över sin roll på byrån. Många av de spännande situationerna uppstod när agenter mötte agenter och byråmedlemmar mötte varandra. Ett kul tillägg som efterfrågades var att byrån skulle kunna ha en mötesplats för att hitta på saker tillsammans och koordinera sina agenter.