In 1998, we created our first project available online: Kidnap. We had the challenge of making an experience for audiences where only two people – the winners of the lottery who would be kidnapped – would experience the work in person. Our answer was to set up a website with a live video stream from a… Read more »
Many of our works have high thresholds to entry: sometimes novel structures or difficult ideas; sometimes ways of using everyday devices just a little ‘off’ from what we mostly use them for. In all of this we need to know you are alright; that you can navigate; that you can get along with the rules and stay… Read more »
Our first project using mobile devices with audiences was Uncle Roy All Around You in 2003. At the time, it was a novelty to record audio or navigate maps using a touch screen. We had to choose a word to refer to the device that we give you at Front of House (a PDA –… Read more »
In 1992 we made Chemical Wedding, our second piece of work. David Hughes – a believer in Blast Theory from the get go and editor of Hybrid Magazine – gave us the chance to do a work-in-progress in Holborn with an invited test audience. But we couldn’t afford to make all of the films that… Read more »
We often make risky projects. It might be the risk to people who are playing a game among traffic or just the risk that our software will crash. For the last decade, we have used pre-mortems for all our larger works. In a pre-mortem, the whole team sits down a few weeks before the event… Read more »
Disobedient participants, or rather people who find their own way into our work, have become a strength of some of our work: a heart that is largely invisible to the outside, which we cherish greatly. In each work we assume that real disruption is likely and troubleshoot and ‘pre-mortem’ this in advance. However, I want… Read more »
After an early incident where the first year and a half of all of Blast Theory’s files were accidentally deleted in an Amstrad floppy drive, we thought that for a long time we had our shit together with archiving and backups. From the late 1990s, neatly labelled stacks of ZIP disks and DAT tapes sat… Read more »