Just before the international larp conference Knutpunkt in Gothenburg, there will be a gathering of artists with interest in larp, hosted by Skogen. Sublime Pretense 3 has the theme Author/Audience/Awkward.
Again, we want to bring together people who are working in the areas of larp and art, incorporating elements of pretend play, durational experience, narrative co-creation, inter-immersion, character fidelity, and game mechanics in their works.
I will give a short presentation, tying in to the audience theme:
Larp is sometimes overwhelming and leaves a lot of responsibilities to the participants. All the decision making – timing, direction, dramaturgy, metaconcious considerations – can stand in the way for an artistic experience. To solve this aesthetic conundrum I have experimented with the concept of “avatars”, thinking about audience interaction with tools from digital game design and esotericism. By separating participant agency and action, a space opens for aesthetic experience. I will share how this can work in practice, aided by mobile phones and headphones, with examples from my work as a writer and director in performance art.
- WHEN: April 16th 10-14.00
- WHERE: Skogen, Masthuggsterrassen 3, 41318 Göteborg
- HOW: More info and sign up!
Sublime Pretense is organized by Corinne Mazzoli, Kaisa Kangas, Sophie Allerding, Lorenzo “Lin” Angeli, Jana Romanova, Jamie MacDonald & Jaakko Stenros.
The full program includes:
- Adrian Hon – Backlash to participation
- Carina Erdmann – Inquiry and Enigma: Role-play as Rehearsal and Research
- Gabriel Widing – Avatars on Stage
- Corinne Mazzoli – Island of Liminal Distance
- Leland Masek & Corinne Mazzoli – Until the Art Takes Us
- David Spraggs – Participatory rituals
- Lorenzo Lin Angeli – Audience awkwardness
- Jana Romanova – Designing (with) Expectations
- Anna Volodina – Survey on Larp in art
Transcription
As a larper I have a lot of problems with larp and all it demands from us – preparation, effort, improvisation, metaconsciousness and so on. Larp is overwhelming and it leaves a lot of responsibilities to the participants. All the decision making – timing, direction, dramaturgy is at the hands of the participants. This has qualities, don’t get me wrong, but as an artist and director of performace I have even more problems with larp as a format. Leaving all these resposibilities to a drop-in audience for an hour or two at a black box theatre – it’s just too much. I love participation and audience interaction, but I think larping, through overloading the audience, can stand in the way of an artistic and aethetic experience.
To solve this aesthetic conundrum I have experimented, over many years, with the concept of “avatars”, thinking about audience interaction with tools from digital game design and esotericism. In games, avatars are virtual bodies, governed by the player. In an esoteric, or theological framework, the avatar is a physical body manifesting a higher or unknown power. I’m sure you know this motif: how the gods need to take shape and form to run errands on earth. Vishnu, most famously, appears in many shapes: the lover, king, the cosmic turtle. Christ is God incarnate in human form. Zeus appears as a swan or a bull to seduce or abuse. Loki appears as a mare, a salmon, an old woman. In occult and mystical traditions “lesser” powers, like ghosts, angels, spirits and demons can enter, inhabit, or act through a human body.
But even in computer games we can see the player as an avatar, think about it through the russian reversal joke: “In America, you play Tetris – in Soviet Russia Tetris plays you.” – meaning: the game system actually controls the players fingers, hands, mucles and mind. The game effectively “plays” the player, like a puppet master animate the puppet.
So, how can we use these modes of incarnation, channeling, shapeshifting, programming and possession in a performance art context? I often return to the head-phone based, guiding voice. It is individual, it is close to the ear and it is easy to internalize a voice like that – because our mind is already inhabited by a multutude of familiar and foreign voices. The audience, just like an avatar, can become a vessel.
In Human Agency (Nyxxx, 2014) there are 30 participants but only 12, prerecorded, synchronized, voices in headphones. When an avatar rasie their hand, anyone can take their headphones thereby transform from “human” to “avatar”. This was made very low-budget with mp3-players.
With more experience and trust from the theatre institutions I got my hands on radio technology, still analogue and we could use many frequecies to give personal instructions. The premise for Din inre röst (Your inner voice, Nyxxx, 2014) is that a bodiless ghost haunts the class room. It will “borrow” the body of the participants to understand what it means and how it feels to be a body in space.
In Twelve talking dolls (Nyxxx, 2018) I took the radio recievers we had but attached speakers to them instead of headphones. Resulting in a responsive choir of dolls. They scream, cry and comfort, threaten and pray, seduce and order, invoke and plead, explain, hypnotize, confess and terrorize. As an audience member you can pick the dolls up and hold them, take care of them and manipulate them. At first, you feel that you have the “power” over the dolls, but in the end you become their subjects.
In recent years, the mobile phone has become my primary interface to play with the audience. Ekstasis (Nyxxx/Pusselbit games, 2021) is a typical covid piece. You play the scenario 4 people at home, with your own phones. As the story progress through a multiplayer choose your own adventure, you are all getting possessed by a deamon.
Mobilized (Widing & Landin, 2024) has been played both in art institutions and in larp festivals like Immersion and Grenselandet. Instructions arrive in text like direct messages. It really treats the audience like cyborgs – they already arrive in a human-cell phone-symbiosis and we keep it that way through the show. In one situation you control someone else with “action buttons” and by pressing “switch” (a concept some of you might know from other contexts), the roles are reversed.
My most recent work, A Game of Life (Widing & Landin / Nyxxx, 2026) , premiered just a week ago. It takes the situation from Mobilized one step further and combines mobile phones with headphones. On stage there are avatars, directed by headphone instructions. In the audience there are Operators, guiding and controlling the avatars on stage. By separating participant agency and action, a space opens for aesthetic experience and a 1-on-1 relationship is developed, where one part can make the descicions and keep the overview, while the other part can immerse in the game world.
Coming back to larp as an artistic medium I think there are 2 keys. The first key is to reduce the scope of participation to exactly what the piece or scenario requires – not asking the audience to do all and everything at once. The second key is to engage with the long history of incantation, incarnation, possession and channeling that the esoteric traditions provide us with, to rethink what roleplaying can be.
In the future you will not necessarily roleplay, the role plays you.
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