PQ 011_day six

A warm day six began with a trip back to the Veletrzni expositions, as I was particularly intrigued by the Netherlands' walking trip '7Scenes'. This IPhone walking tour / treasure hunt / game was part of the new genre of 'performative user experiences' that are not theatre in the sense that they do not necessarily involve a live actor, but utilise mobile technology (phone, gps, bluetooth, 3G) to network 'live players' either together or to some central system. In this way players create their own experience from the instructions or narrative given by the creator of the performance. The freedom in space and time that these forms open up was demonstrated by 7Scenes, where players were guided on a route through the city using picture clues. The 'performance' was constructed around a set of old photographs, taken in Prague in the 1960s. When you arrived near the scene of one of the photos, a GPS trigger played a audio clip, instructing you to take a photo inspired by the original. As you couldn't see this, the audio offered a series of clues, such as 'take a self-portrait with your eyes closed'. The heightened awareness of being 'part of something' had a tangible impact in terms of framing the city - opening your eyes to things that otherwise might have seemed banal. Having said that, the mobile interface became a bit of a distraction. The nicest touch was that photos were automatically uploaded and printed in the exhibition space (alongside the 1968 ones), providing a fascinating insight into the multiplicity of ways that people looked at the city and interpreted the instructions.

There was just enough time for a coffee on the roof terrace before a hurried tram ride across town in time to get a seat at the packed architecture section where Professor Marvin Carlson was giving the task of answering the central question of the section, 'What is a theatre?'. This was a hugely relevant talk for both myself and the large crowd gathered in St Annes, as he sought to cram the recent history of site-specificity and future developments into a hour-long lecture. Taking Peter Brook's 'empty stage' quote as a point of reference Professor Carlson explored notions of scenographic control, the framing of the everyday (optical unconsciousness), through to the techno-theatre of Smartphones. He suggested that the digital (web 2.0) era had further opened up Peter Brook's ideas about 'I' to 'we' (can take any space, real or virtual, and call it a theatre). Interestingly this statement was qualified using the social science term 'interpolation' whereby the creation of something (theatre) just by giving it a name relies on your 'authority to do this, ie. you still need an 'audience' willing to 'buy into it' or 'go along with it'. Responses from Jane Rendell & Christopher Baugh were also though-provoking, and raised questions about a new definition of 'architecture'.

After 2 hours of exhausting notetaking I needed a break, and got to the Czech Bridge just in time for the start of Christina Bosse's hour-long public 'situation' and to see what was going to happen in the place of 500 people. The bridge had been closed to traffic and it appeared that she had managed to get some chairs - after a slow start people began to congregate around these focal points, and individuals / groups of people subtly but gradually took over the bridge as a public space. Here is a link to an animation I produced as a web-based documentation experiment and as part of my learning process of flash.

The remainder of the evening was spent talking with Doina Petrescu, tuesday's keynote architecture speaker (and my Masters tutor), but I also managed to catch he Scenofest Fourth Act installation, where an interesting back street had been converted into a outdoor living room - but lacked any real invention beyond the use of furniture in an unlikely setting.