Output details
35 - Music, Drama, Dance and Performing Arts
Royal Central School of Speech and Drama
A Machine To See With
• PaR (DVD and portfolio)
An aesthetic and technological research project creating a self-reflexive experience for individual participants, who receive instructions for action via their mobile phones. Customised software was developed to manage phone-calls second by second in order to create an ostensibly personalised experience.
300 words - Information about the research process and/ or content
A Locative Cinema commission from the Sundance Film Festival, the outcome of this project was first mobilised in San Jose on 16th September 2010. The initial research inquiry concerned ways ethical and political dilemmas might be activated by blurring the boundaries between cinematic fiction and everyday life. Key ethical questions include how far one should manipulate participants and what happens at the point where manipulation induces ethical crisis, throwing participants back into their own value system. But the aim was also to challenge the 2008 financial crisis and the impotence of citizens confronted by global capitalism. Attempted bank robbery is at the heart of the piece and money plays a recurrent part.
To construct what became a highly self-reflexive experience for participants, the initial approach was to think of our eyes as the screens themselves. In seeking to insert screens into the cityscape, a key finding was that the tropes of cinema are always already in the urban environment and within us. A disposition to perform in cinematic modes is also strong in postmodern culture (performing ourselves on Facebook, for example). Research also drew on Robert Reich's Locked In The Cabinet which explores Bill Clinton’s attempt to get re-elected against the odds in 1996 using a call centre strategy. A dramaturgy was developed, drawing on telephone calls and a heist movie, probing the border between fiction and reality and participants’ desire to transgress it. The participant’s immersion in the fiction of the event is ultimately problematised when s/he realizes s/he must - to follow out the dramaturgy coherently - actually rob a bank.
Technological research was necessary to create an interactive, immersive and individualised experience for participants. Asterisk (open source call centre) software was customised to manage phone-calls second by second in order to create an ostensibly personalised experience.
