West Pier – Blast Theory day 8
Posted: August 10, 2011 Filed under: BT Residency, playing with reality | Tags: blasttheory, brighton, Culture, DCRC, liminal 1 Comment »
Here are a couple of pics from the seafront. The west pier on Tuesday night and about half a day later on Wednesday. The pier is a bit hard to see at night. But interestingly, and also hard to see, there are couples in just about the same spot, looking out to the pier. It seems like it would be a popular place for reflection.
The West Pier is in a very liminal state, it is betwixt and between. Since being abandoned it has never quite been in use although there have always been schemes about to bear fruit. There are now plans for a tower to be built on the site.
Piers themselves are interesting examples of liminal spaces (as well as seaside resort towns in general, see Rob Shields Places on the Margin). They are zones of carnival and play, symbolically sitting on the border between land and sea, jutting out excitingly over the sea. They evoke, both in their presence and their rides, a sense of what Caillois would call vertigo, a dominant feeling, but mixed in with competition, chance and mimicry. Just by walking out on the pier one engages in a very sensual engagement with gravity and the elements.
Sitting watching the West Pier from the shore, one is reminded of all that without being able to take part. Sitting on the beach you are now separated by a true boundary from what was a liminal space and is now a symbol of the dead carnival. It is very similar to the ancient Egyptians looking across the nile to the tombs on the west bank and seeing a threshold, the routes to the lands of the dead, the routes to the afterlife.
Blast Theory residency day 1
Posted: August 1, 2011 Filed under: announcements, BT Residency, game studies, playing with reality | Tags: Anthropology, blasttheory, brighton, DCRC, pervasive games, PhD 1 Comment »So here I am, sitting all by myself in the darkened Blast Theory studio, at a coffee table with all of the Day of the Figurines tiny little figures from The Goody Bullets set into it. It is a little like sitting over some lilliputian cryogenic facility, or maybe the B-Ark.
(Update: It was the table used for The Goody Bullets, not DotF. Goody Bullets was an SMS/figurine game made for the V&A Decode exhibition open late night)
For the next month I will be working on a residency in the Blast Theory studio, producing a chapter in my PhD and hopefully a paper from that as well. This work will tie up with my ethnography of big and street games and provide a view on a very different type of game, experience or performance.
Here is an excerpt from my proposal that introduces what it is I intend to do here whilst here.
This is an academic residency, intended to engage with Blast Theory’s practice over an extended period. The most important thing for me is to gain access and insight into developmental processes, of both work in progress and finished pieces.
One of the theoretical influences on my PhD is Victor Turner’s book, The Ritual Process. At its heart is a three stage process, developed from the work of Van Gennep, of separation, margin and reaggregation. Although his early work focuses on ritual (liminal) experiences, in tribal societies, his later work turns to ritual-like (liminoid) experiences in modern culture.
Blast Theory’s work wonderfully mirrors this process and many pervasive games tend to follow this three part trajectory. Blast Theory’s heavily designed and scripted introductions, include practices seemingly lifted directly from tribal culture, such as stripping participants of their possessions, fit well with the separation phase, moving one from the everyday. These are followed by periods that involve confusion, questioning of norms and social sensitisation. Finally there is some form of coda or after effect that means the experience will resonate or provoke reflection to either the individual or a wider social group.