After considering the licensing needed for a turfed area in the council owned high street we decided to develop a previous idea with a heavier use of technology to reflect upon pervasive media. The use of QR codes in our performance would be more interactive for the audience but also would directly relate to our brief on exploring pervasive media but also the theme of liberation

Building upon our idea of using QR coding in our performance we began discussing what QR codes are commonly used for. Marketing techniques use QR codes for commercial and on-line advertising to spread their product across a different platform other than one dimensional paper advertising. Therefore, our site the high street is the perfect space for QR advertising to take place. It is a highly commercial space filled with advertising material and the handing over of money, things that a QR code is commonly associated with. Therefore we wanted to warp the common use of a QR code by advertising the code on t-shirts, but having the content be unrelated to the commercial industry.

After reading “Wandering and wondering” where Gorman describes her experience of being on an audio tour titled ‘Missing Voice’ in an area of London, we wanted to disrupt the audience’s view of the space by reducing the high street to just another collective urban space in a world greater and in need of more than a street of shops. Gorman writes “During my own experience of doing the ‘Missing Voice’ walk I felt that a certain sense of complacency about the nature of the urban street had been destabilized. My perceptions of the street activity, the sounds around me and my sense of belonging in that environment were heightened.”(Gorman, 2003, 168) Gorman experienced a change of perception toward the significance of the commercial space during the audio tour and the ‘sense of belonging’ that she found suggests she began to have a deeper more human experience of the site where the people in the environment confirmed to her the sense that “life must go on”(Gorman, 2003, 168).

We wanted to achieve something similar by putting audio content in our QR codes that removed the listener from the space completely, reducing its importance.

Gorman, S. (2003) Wandering and Wondering. Performance Research. 8 (1) 167-178

After reading about Michael Pinchbeck’s work “Sit with me for a moment and remember” a number of questions came to me in regards to our chosen site, the public high street. How often do we walk past people with our heads down and our eyes locked to the screen of a phone? How can we share one space with so many strangers and yet pass through it remembering nothing about it or them? When do we ever just “sit for a moment and remember”, taking in all that is around? Our site, a busy public space, includes busy shoppers on a mission to reach their destination, exchange their money for a product and then leave just as quickly as they arrived. This thought inspired me to create a piece that disrupted the flow of the high street, a pause in the audience’s (i.e the public) lives, taking a moment to stop and look around them without removing them physically from the site.

Reflecting Lavery’s “25 instructions for performing in cities” I wanted to create a piece of work much like his seventeenth instruction “build a forest in a city” (Lavery, 2005, 236).
A turfed area with potted trees would disrupt the space and with two deck chairs and soft bird song playing from hidden speakers the audience would be invited to sit with the actor and have a conversation with a stranger. Opening a dialogue in this way between two strangers is particularly special as the high street contains so many people and voices that very rarely cross paths and there is very rarely time allowed for human interaction, or else there is a risk of breaking the rhythm of the busy shopping strip.
The concrete, economic space of the high street is contrasted against the peaceful spectacle of a green forest rejecting the original view of the space and encouraging people to review how they see the space they are in.

This idea of rejecting the current use of the site or creating a piece that contrasts, was inspired by Claire Blundell Jones’ project “Walking, the Western and the tumbleweed” and her desire to “become aware of suburban details and social space….exploring the notions of private and public space [and] create a new playful space between myself and the unsuspecting audience, who can potentially begin to imagine alternatives in their local environment, re-imagining it.” (Jones, 2010, 88)
Although our piece will not involve getting lost, wandering aimlessly, in the city in order to break the flow of the busy street, it would disrupt the high street and it’s visitors. This will ultimately remove them from their isolated pathways through the space, inviting them to take a moment to look up and around and to review how they see the space.

Blundell Jones, C. (2010) Walking, the Western and the tumbleweed. Visual Studies. 25 (1) 87-88
Lavery, C (2005) Teaching Performance Studies: 25 instructions for performance in cities. Studies in Theatre and Performance. 25 (3) 229-236

One of Carl Lavery’s “25 instructions for performance in cities” was to listen and record the conversations of strangers in a coffee shop or bar, and use it as a basis of a performance text. Here is our documentation of this event.

Following another of Lavery’s 25 instructions, me and my partner chose to leave messages of friendliness around our chosen city site and document how we did it in a video. Here is a photo of the messages we wrote.

We felt that by doing this the performance was the reaction of the non-players (unaware audience) when they read the messages and took part actively in our performative act without realising what it was.

When reading our messages they were removed from the very public space of the high street and drawn in to a more intimate space between them and the performers without realising they were actively participating.

Week2:

Janne Tapper’s article Pervasive Games explored the aspects of a pervasive playing culture and the space of in-between-ness between players and non-players. “Pervasive playing consists of a wide variety of games and playing, which are played in the quotidian social environment amongst non-players who may or may not be aware of the playing. The non-players are unaware the game exists in the first place” (Tapper, 143)

However, this raises questions as to whether a performance can really be considered a performance if the non-players are not aware they are witnessing a performance?
The quotidian, meaning everyday space, is the space where non-players make a sudden realisation of the odd behaviour of the players and it is this moment that Tapper calls a moment of in-between-ness. When considering site-specific performance alongside Tapper’s theory of the space of in-between-ness, it was interesting to consider how our site-specific performances may be perceived by non-players – the audience. With our site being an urban space, set in the high street, the non-players will be the public.

“Players need to be aware of both the game world and ordinary life…This space in-between play and reality is structurally embedded in to pervasive games.” (Tapper, 150)

The public sphere, in our case the high street, is the quotidian where non-players will experience this moment of in-between-ness during our site-specific performance.

(My understanding of Site-Specific Performance after reading Mike Pearson’s “Site-Specific Performance”, Introduction.)

Site-specific Performance Definition: performance generated from or for a selected site
‘Layers of the site are revealed through reference to historical documentation, site usage (past/present), text, sound, personal associations, half-truths, lies.’ (Wilkie, 2002a, 150, as cited in Pearson, 2010, 8)
Part of the work has to do with researching a place and its history, then inserting a classical or modern text in to this ‘found space’ which then throws a new light on it.

Pervasive media is new types of digital media linked to an awareness of place and location. It is delivered in to the fabric of everyday life. (Watershed, 2015)