This text was published in the anthology Ludokonst, 2025, as a reflection on the gathering with the same name. It was written in close dialogue with Nea Landin. The book was released by Konstmuseet i Skövde.
Democracy cannot be defined simply by its means — not via voting, discussion, or general assemblies. Real democracy must be defined by its goal — collective self-mastery. /…/ The command of The Plan must be married to the improvised order of The Network.
– Williams & Srnicek, #Accelerate Manifesto (2013)
Performing at the Ludokonst festival in PlayLab, Skövde, immediately raises questions about play and games in artistic context. Both artists and audiences can practice play in relation to art. This text will focus on an audience at play in our contribution to the festival. We showed a performance called Mobilized, the work was introduced to the audience with the following invitation:
Mobilized is a participatory performance exploring the power and potential of the smartphone. Rather than asking you to turn it off when entering the theater, we ask you to keep it ready for use. Your phone will be the portal that takes you and other audience members into the constructed reality of the piece. The format is based on simple instructions and choices that appear on your screen through text, images and sound. The instructions shape different situations and collective movements.
This invitation leans on play culture in how it formulates guidelines and manages expectations. In order to enable participation, the means and methods of interfacing with the game should be made explicit. Audiences that do not know when and how to approach a participatory performance or game, tend to withdraw. Furthermore the work poses as an “essay pretending to be a game,” which means we aim to think together with our audience while having some playful encounters along the way. What we put into play, or at risk, in Mobilized is the body, senses, relations and agency of the participant. The bodies are activated through instructions, mobilized through individual or collective tasks. The work will play out only if the audience actively engages with these tasks. Their senses are divided between the phone and the space, eyes flickering from the screen to the stage. Relations appear in choreographies, chat rooms and through a game of control. And the agency of every participant is subject to different systems of instructions, feedback, crowd control, algorithmic instructions, forking paths, chosen and assigned variables.
How the work actually works is quite a challenge to disentangle. Sometimes our thoughts feel as messy as our code. Every situation is directed by a combination of code, instructions, rules and proposals. Some instructions are prewritten, some are sourced by the participants. The performance appears when the audience, just like in a game, submit to these systems and suggestions. The performance is not about refusing this entanglement with technology but to engage with it.
In this context, C. Thi Nguyen’s relatively recent definition of games feels fruitful:
Games, then, are a unique social technology. They are a method for inscribing forms of agency into artifactual vessels: for recording them, preserving them, and passing them around. And we possess a special ability; we can submerge ourselves in alternate agencies designed by another. In other words, we can use games to communicate forms of agency. (Nguyen, 2020, p. 1)
If there is a “form of agency” that we are looking for in Mobilized it is a moving collective body that would not have been possible to materialize without the networked capacity of the smartphones and the social and sensory capacity of the participants. Nguyen’s definition puts an emphasis on the social as well as aesthetic dimension of games. The idea of games as “alternate agencies” allow for an understanding that acting and doing under specific rules can produce and reproduce certain subjective as well as collective states. Games propose a temporary modus operandi where we can try new or different ways of being and acting, different ways of sharing space. In the world of art, a similar way of thinking has been proposed by Ranciere:
A distribution of the sensible therefore establishes at one and the same time something common that is shared and exclusive parts. This apportionment of parts and positions is based on a distribution of spaces, times, and forms of activity that determines the very manner in which something in common lends itself to participation and in what way various individuals have a part in this distribution. (Ranciere, 2004, p. 12)
So if art can show us ways of looking or perceiving, games can show us ways of acting. Here, games, art and politics come together in the sense that they all propose different ways to share a world. This sharing is always divided because some things can or can not be done, seen, renegotiated.
Coming from a background of participatory arts, such as live action role-play and improvised dance, we are always on the lookout for formats that can involve the audience in a collective performative situation with a low threshold to joining in. We enjoy the playful, mutual exploration that can happen in larp and dance jams, but they usually require either personal preparations (larp) or technique (improvised dance). Using phones to guide a game/performance is great in that sense because we can shortcut some of the conditions that make participation inaccessible to a wider audience. The technology lets us set up parameters which allows an audience with no previous dance or larp experience to contribute to the game through text or choices. At the start of the game they are also able to decide how they want to engage, for example, if they want to use their voice during the play or not. This gives some flexibility in how to engage with the piece.
What we are trying to think about in Mobilized is the use and misuse of the smartphone, a device that has found its way to each and every hand and that follows us from our morning routine to bedtime. Although the phone opens up a global network of interconnection between people, it has become a symbol of ultimate isolation and alienation as well. In its general use, it produces a closed circuit: touch-screen-image-gaze-desire-touch.
Psycho-analytic media theorist Sherry Turkle in Alone Together:
“Some would say that we have already completed a forbidden experiment, using ourselves as subjects with no controls, and the unhappy findings are in: we are connected as we’ve never been before, and we seem to have damaged ourselves in the process.” (Turkle, 2011, p. 293)
The dark side of digital connectivity, according to Turkle, is a detachment in the social and physical world. This “damage” is both individual, in terms of mental health, and shared, in terms of how the social world crumbles. How can we break out of the scrolling circuit? An exit is unlikely to appear through the app store. The smartphone apps that value screen time over anything are in majority, and the apps that support our bodily, social, collective, shared reality are but few. Where did the 90’s dreams of the Internet as a liberating force go? The potential is there, we got glimpses of it when people flooded the street organizing protests in the Arab spring (2010) and hunting pokémon (Pokémon Go, 2016). During these rare events general access to smartphones transformed social relations overnight. Returning to the Williams and Srnicek quotation that opened this text, these are situations where a plan (a political or playful one) meets a network (of activists or enthusiastic gamers).
No matter whether the smartphone is damaging or not, it is obviously here, in each and everyones’ hand. From an artistic point of view, the device works very well as what is sometimes phrased an “alibi for interaction”, a thing or a concept that can push an audience into a situation where certain social behaviors are overturned. Obvious examples of such an alibi would be a ball that you are allowed to chase, or a clown nose that allows awkward behavior. The smartphone shields the audience and allows some otherwise strange behaviors. When it comes to participation in performance art, the audience are not necessarily afraid to do things. They are afraid of being exposed, or even being seen. Acting with a smartphone in hand makes you feel less exposed. With the smartphone as a kind of transitional object, we allow ourselves to play. And it’s so diverse in its capabilities – it can contain proposals, instructions, rules, variables.
The experience of working with Mobilized suggests that a key to transforming the smartphone into a device for collective artistic exploration and contemplation is that we ourselves have composed the code that runs the performance, not relying on software provided by ravenous startups or global enterprises. That way we can retain artistic autonomy and also gain the trust of the audience to engage with a chaotic techno-corporeal proposal that mirrors and challenges the world we live in.
One of the games in Mobilized consists of a situation in which the audience are split into pairs where one takes on the role of “player” and the other takes on the role of an “avatar.” The player can send commands to the avatar by pressing a set of control buttons. The avatar receives these commands as text with a little ding sound. We think of this as a “control game” where participants lend their bodies to each other. This situation is of course a kind of exercise in remote power, but also trust. Alongside the control button there is also a Switch-button that reverses the roles in the control game. Many of our participants come out of Mobilized with this situation foregrounded in their minds and we think it deserves further artistic exploration. The game situation makes it clear how the device already functions as a kind of remote control in our everyday life. It makes remote control of human bodies explicit and possible to experience and explore with the safety net of a staged situation with clear boundaries in time and space. It is networked mobilization grounded in mutual trust. Towards the end of the performance you can debrief from this control game in an intimate chat room on the phone with the one you were paired up with.
In future play tests we will take the control game to public spaces to see if the relation between players and avatars can be sustained in a more uncontrolled environment. Rather than displaying instructions on screen, the player’s click will result in an in-ear voice instruction to the avatar. That way the avatars can move more freely through space. When you look out over a square in the near future, anyone out there with headphones might be a secret agent, performing tasks in an unknown game.
If Mobilized, as a game, proposes some sort of agency, we hope that it is an agency capable of acting through “the improvised order of The Network” as well as through “The command of The Plan.” The performance is ultimately an exercise for movement and mobilization in the age of smartphones.
REFERENCES
Turkle, Sherry. 2011. Alone Together: Why We Expect More from Technology and Less from Each Other. Basic books.
Nguyen, C. Thi. 2020. Games: Agency as Art. New York: Oxford University Press.
Rancière, Jacques: 2006. The Politics of Aesthetics / The Aesthetics of Politics, Continuum.
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