Prototyping for movement with mobile phones

Playtesting

I’ve been spending a week with dancer and artist Nea Landin at a residency initiated by Danscentrum in a new studio in Stockholm called Söderkupolen. We met in a coding course at Konstfack and have similar interests in instruction based performances. In the residency we started working with real-time multi-user web technologies. Instructions are distributed through the participants mobile phones. These ideas have a lot of potential and I think we are only in the very beginning of something very exciting. Even if the instructions are simple they can mobilise big audience numbers in collective action.

Prototype screenshots

We drew some inspiration from a really nice article (in Swedish, in Hjärnstorm) by Rasmus Fleischer, outlining some anthropological insights from Keeping Together in Time: Dance and Drill in Human History written by William H. McNeill.

Some snippets from McNeill:

Moving briskly and keeping in time was enough to make us feel good about ourselves, satisfied to be moving together, and vaguely pleased with the world at large.

“Boundary loss” is the individual and “feeling they are one” is the collective way of looking at the same thing: a blurring of self-awareness and the heightening of fellow-feeling with all who share in the dance.

Co-hosting The Unquiet Veil

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.