Inter Arts Center “a platform for artistic research and experimentation” are very into games and play these days. Me and Nea Landin performed Mobilized there at Immersive days #3: Agents in Play. In the aftermaths i had the pleasure of giving a short improvised talk and enter a dialogue with Christer Lundahl and Martina Seitl.
A Thinking Practice is a practice based symposium addressing collective learning processes in relation to listening, asymmetries, filth, not-knowing and desire. We long for a space to think, feel, organize and practice with others. A space where we, despite knowing that we won’t find any simple solutions, engage with each other in an unknown future.
The symposium is initiated from an interest in working collectively, from the perspective of the fields of choreography and urban planning. We believe that in times of urgencies, in moments of doubt, in seconds of fear, we must gather and think. And thinking does not mean big Thought, but a practice which involves every nerve and every relation. A thinking that involves paying attention to that which is already there in order to imagine what could be. We notice each other because we are at stake to each other.
The focus of the symposium is to practically investigate forms of thinking. We believe that all thoughts are thought from somewhere – in relation to a practice and to thoughts previously thought. We therefore see that how we think is crucial for what we think. Through which practices can we attune ourselves to listen for that which we do not already know? What practices of attention help us to be available for others, for the not-understandable, for the opaque? And how can we encourage each other to think, in all its multitude of practices, in order to create collective change?
PRESENTING AT THE SYMPOSIUM Eduardo Abrantes, Juli Apponen, Eleanor Bauer, Áron Birtalan, Åsa Bjerndell, Amy Boulton, Oda Brekke, Xiyao Chen, Sebastian Dahlqvist, Rosa Danenberg, Laressa Dickey, Disorder, Darya Efrat, Anna Enström, Benj Gerdes, Tiril Hasselknippe, Sara Kaaman, Elke Krasny, Carmen Lael Hines, Ying-Tzu Lin, Pedram Nasouri, Chrysa Parkinson, Kibandu Pello-Esso, Sophia Persson, Pontus Pettersson, Tuija Roberntz, Tove Salmgren, Alexis Steeves, Ellen Söderhult, Cara Tolmie, Ana Vujanovic, Gabriel Widing, Andros Zins-Browne, Jenny Övergaard
PRACTICAL INFORMATION The symposium takes place at Hägerstensåsens Medborgarhus at 10-17 on the 10-11th of June. Detailed program will be announced shortly. Participation is free and a detailed program will soon be presented. Register at: anmalan@medborgarhuset.se.
I will co-host this scenario with its maker Áron Birtalan.
The Unquiet Veil is a low-key role-playing experience / fictional workshop where players are guided through playful and mystical activities in which they develop their own practice of ‘everyday death magick’, make a pact with an imaginary entity, and create a spellbook that they take with themselves after the event.
The experience brings together pretend-play magick, electronic music, office protocols and playful more-than-human imagination. It also features a synthesizer that casts spells, a band of singing undertakers and lots of metaphysical bureaucracy.
This week I’ve been working with Áron Birtalan in a part of their PhD project Your Bones Hold the Shape of What’s to Come. The piece is titled The Unquiet Veil – A Living Person’s Guide to Death Magick in Four Unfinished Songs. As iwth many participatory proposals it’s somewhere between a workshop and a scenario and we are guiding the participants through different aesthetically informed activities.
The Unquiet Veil is a low-key role-playing experience / fictional workshop where players are guided through playful and mystical activities in which they develop their own practice of ‘everyday death magick’, make a pact with an imaginary entity, and create a spellbook that they take with themselves after the event.
The experience brings together pretend-play magick, electronic music, office protocols and playful more-than-human imagination. It also features a synthesizer that casts spells, a band of singing undertakers and lots of metaphysical bureaucracy.
The piece is available for touring. More info here.
A Portuguese/Brazilian translation of Deltagarkultur has dropped in the shape of Artes Participativas.
Thank you Tadeu Rodrigues Iuama for translating it and to Luiz Falcão for a proper re-enactment of the original shape and form. It is published by NpLarp and Editora Provocare. The book was written 2008 by Kristoffer Haggren, Elge Larsson and Andrea Nordwall.
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:
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.
An UngaTur performance piece in collaboration with Interacting Arts
There is no audience.
There are no actors.
The Avatar Condition is something else.
Discover who you become when someone else makes your decisions.
The Avatar Condition is an invitation to being controlled. To act without having to make decisions. Through headphones, you are instructed to move, speak and act – collectively and individually. You don’t need any prior knowledge to participate. A voice will guide you through the piece, which takes place as much in your own head as it does in the space.
The Avatar Condition has been developed in Stockholm, Malmö, Västerås and Copenhagen during the last year. December 8-11 of 2011, The Avatar Condition takes over the Stockholm Theatre Turteatern.
Where will it go next? Maybe to a black box, dance studio, abandoned industrial building or inhabited villa close to you…
Take a decision to give up your freedom of choice! Bring us over and try out The Avatar Condition.
By: Albin Werle, Ebba Petrén, Elize Arvefjord, Gabriel Widing, Kerstin Weimers, Klara Backman, Moa Backman and Tova Gerge.
This is a simple score for an aesthetic experience tied to our smelling senses. It’s not site, but audience specific in the sense that the experience will differ depending on whom the participants are. The Circle of Scent is realized through a few simple steps:
The avatar figure derives from hindu gods taking human or animal shape to run errands on earth. In the digital communities of the 90:s the concept was reversed – the participants were represented by digital characters on screen, putting people in the former positions of the gods. This project is about the avatar condition, being possesed by an outer force, voice or possibly a system. The avatar is already inherent in the hierarchical mind-body distinction. The mind is already an alien presence in the body, telling it what to do. The Avatar Condition aims to externalise that process of loosing and taking control of the body-turning-machine.
The Avatar Condition is so far an artistic research project and it has not found a proper, presentable and public form yet. What we do at this point is to try out different modes, atmospheres, instructions and stories. There is no passive-spectating audience in this process. Everyone becomes involved in an unfolding story on control, desire and choice.
The Avatar Condition is a proposal developed by Ebba Petrén based in Malmö, who recently organized a festival on participation and theatre and Gabriel Widing, game desiger, based in Stockholm. Together we have produced black-box role-playing scenarios in different contexts and our interest remains in the potentials of combining games, play, theatre and performance practices. Avatar workshops and game tests has previously been organized in Stockholm, Västerås, Malmö and Copenhagen.
Eirik Fatland kindly translated this post from swedish.