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Fortnight

Fortnight is a two-week immersive experience exploring technology, intimacy, alienation and place. In each iteration (Bristol, Lancaster, Manchester, Oxford, etc.), up to 200 participants received messages sent to phones, email, and home addresses, containing poetic nudges encouraging them to question their sense of place. Participants also received daily invitations to visit locations to reflect on what it means to ‘be here’ now. Research explored intimacy and alienation and how technology brings us together yet leaves us distanced from our sense of community. My engagement stemmed from wider research into digital technology in contemporary performance practice, which Fortnight has informed, playing with and ‘mis-using’ technologies to explore anxieties of intimacy and alienation. I contributed with other collaborators to Fortnight’s conceptual framework, its structure (in the macro), and the shape of participants’ experiences; what technology and theatrical devices were used, why, and how. This allowed practical experience of how using and ‘mis-using’ technologies interrogates the authenticity of experience, and how we construct non-linear, temporally dissonant theatrical spaces. This is articulated in my forthcoming book chapter, ‘Neither Here Nor There: Composing Intimacy in Para-Historical Space’. A documentary about Fortnight can be seen at http://www.watershed.co.uk/dshed/fortnight. Meanwhile, papers presented by Peter Petralia and Tim Kindberg at the Nesta/ACE/AHRC Digital Day (2011) can be found at http://vimeo.com/27142419. Fortnight is also discussed by Allison Hui in the forthcoming book As We See It: Reflections on Technology, Space and Perception (Palgrave, 2014), following her presentation of ‘Art as an everyday intervention: shifting times, places and mobilities in the pervasive media performance project Fortnight’ at the Association of American Geographers Annual Conference in New York (2012) http://meridian.aag.org/callforpapers/program/SessionDetail.cfm?SessionID=16058. Fortnight was commissioned by various organisations including Nuffield Theatre Lancaster, Mayfest, Watershed, Theatre Sandbox and supported by ACE, Manchester Metropolitan University, Bristol Old Vic and Contact Theatre. Its website is http://www.fortnightproject.com/.