With our work developing in an approach to intimacy and evoking feeling through responses to music, a chance for a workshop with Niki Woods – associate artist for performance group Blast Theory was a welcoming opportunity for the collaborative.
In this session we were acquainted with the ideas of using live streaming technology in a performance context. In the case of this workshop a giant game of hide and seek around the city. Niki introduced us to the application ‘Bambuser’ a live streaming service that allows a person to stream from a mobile device and connect to users around the world. Users can contribute to the stream via live comments, and this made for an interesting afternoon trying to find each other around the city.
As we all became used to the way in which the game worked, we began to ask questions to one another via the messaging capability of the software. What transpired was a very intimate performance, intimate in the way that everyone in the room was watching an interaction with one person, it felt in that moment that we the audience had a personal exchange with that person albeit in a room full of other people. This was our moment of realisation that intimacy is often achieved by being yourself, we had created a moment of intimate performance just by addressing a room full of people via a live stream, by relaxing and not having to perform, but rather enjoying the moment for what it was. In that moment there was no real narrative as to what was happening, the game developed the more we got used to understating that our intimacy was being driven from the everyday and from this quite ‘normal’ exchange with a group of people in a room far away from the ‘live action’.
The workshop took influence from Blast Theory’s latest performance ‘I’d hide you’ an interactive performance which sees ‘runners’ take to a city to show their audience, whist always on the lookout for other runners in the fear of getting their photo taken (snapped). Blast theory say of the work; ‘we are aiming to combine a live TV experience (in which you lean back watching full screen video with an interest in story and character) with a games experience (leaning forwards, making decisions and having a meaningful interaction).’ (Blast Theory n.d)
It was this meaningfulness that was an important notion to take away from the workshop, and I began to think more and more about the work we were creating. Our images where a response to the music we loved, and they were becoming more intimate through the process of development. But I was being drawn back to this idea of meaningfulness that the game had drawn up for me, I had this need to find a context for them to sit alongside and this began my research period into pre-existing bodies of work that we could relate to, and I began to think about how we could collaborate with such a work.