Getting To Know You…, FutureEverything & National Theatre, London

Getting To Know You: Global Seated Network

Future Everything, Manchester touring to International Festival of Theatre, National Theatre, London,

15th May and 9th July, 2010

Come take part in my new commission by Hide&Seek as part of The International Sandpit Project and PlayEverything, Manchester!

Note: plays 14-17, duration of gameplay: 45 minutes

Getting To Know You: Seated Global Network is absurd, tactical gameplay. It involves framework to gather with and against others, challenging what we know and how we interact through quick fire play scenarios that hinges on rule roulette and physical-mind teasers. Let’s forget our electronically bound conditions and reset ourselves back into real time sociability; taking us out of our daily a-zs for some collective spirited mischief…..

I was commissioned to create a new interactive project for Hide & Seek in response to deploying gaming as an integral means to understanding how culture is developing today ‘internationally’.

I devised Getting To Know You: Seated Global Network , a performative gaming event that platformed the participation and creativity of others through intensive gameplay and group interaction . The participants were integrated into a critical network that inverted current technological web based social networking into a physical interactive model, bringing social engagement back to one-on-one human-human physicality, responsiveness and exchange.

My own role as performative host enabled everyone to have a chance to get involved in tactical gameplay- from voting and vetoing, blindfolded spinning, contorted Chinese whispers, psycho-geographical forfeits that incited street activity and interaction with strangers, rapid fire response to Financial Times headlines and pop trivia… my Global Seated Network more widely questioned governmental imposition of laws and rules, systems of chance and capacity to exercise individuality given psychology of the group.

Framework of absurd, tactical play that involved such sensory physical-mental strategizing , role play, competitive tasks, my carefully hand crafted gaming play pieces- all sought to challenge media streams of information and our own individual capacity to exercise our will. Through leveraging chance, arbitrary yet paradoxical pointed structural rules; Getting To Know You… explores our need to forge systems of meaning and simple joy and comfort in the physical interaction of people gathering.

Images from Future Everything and National Theatre, 2010

Gaming token

“With the lovely host Kai-Oi Jay Yung! A little bit of whispering gets the unlucky contestant a forfeit! With beautiful hand made counters.” Giacomo R.

“The incredible spinning artist” Dave Green