To me, the stand out Blast Theory projects are those that nest authentic, undeniably human narratives within innovative, carefully crafted digital interfaces. Works like Can You See Me Now?, You Get Me and We Cut Through Dust that foster a community, of sorts, and transcend physical space with the support of technology. Rider Spoke is… Read more »
Blast Theory have been announced as the embedded artists in residence for an ongoing research project that will help define the responsible use of artificial intelligence (AI). The University of Sheffield’s Framing Responsible AI Implementation and Management (FRAIM) project aims to guide organisations planning to adopt responsible AI in practice and improve public understanding of… Read more »
“It’s not ‘natural’ to speak well, eloquently, in an interesting, articulate way. People living in groups, families, communes say little – have few verbal means. Eloquence – thinking in words – is a byproduct of solitude, deracination, a heightened painful individuality. In groups, it’s more natural to sing, to dance, to pray: given, rather than… Read more »
“Questions and answers depend on a game – a game that is at once pleasant and difficult – in which each of the two partners takes pains to use only the rights given him by the other and by the accepted form of dialogue. The polemicist, on the other hand, proceeds encased in privileges that… Read more »
I am turning my tanker around and I don’t know where I will be heading exactly or even what my tanker might look like. It’s all very hard to fathom and I am sad and scared and excited and emboldened and of course so much more besides. I am expecting (when I least expect it)… Read more »
Ju has been at the heart of Blast Theory since the very beginning, so with Ju’s move to creating work independently, it seemed like a good time to think about how Blast Theory ticks. And from my perspective, what will be the shape of the Ju-shaped-hole that she is about to leave behind? Since I’ve… Read more »
As a part of Cat Royale, we have engaged an Audience Advisory Panel who are coming along with us on this journey, as we try to work out and develop the complex nest of subjects that is the project. We have never done something exactly like this before, although we have employed many forms of… Read more »
We kidnapped two people in 1998. Here is how and why. For about 15 years afterwards, the main way people found their way to our web page on the project was by googling “tips for putting people under surveillance”. So, yes, sometimes I have learned unexpected skills on Blast Theory projects. For two weeks Jamie… Read more »
When you’re young you occasionally take unwise risks and we were no exception. Nick is the new kid in Blast Theory (he joined in 1994) and so wasn’t around when we decided to invite a member of the audience to shoot Ju Row Farr and Bruce Gilchrist with a paintball gun. In the style of… Read more »
So you’re here because you want to take part in my latest project HUNGER – thank you! The latest part of HUNGER is THE WORLD’s DINING TABLE. I’m am running an open call asking participants to contribute drawings and text to create descriptions/representations of their favourite dish, soup recipes, and personal experience of hunger. The… Read more »
So, Blast Theory is 30 years old. Those freewheeling years of our twenties – all parties, waking up in unexpected places, fraught future plans – are over and it’s time to get serious. Those little shudders when I met people who weren’t born when we started has given way to ones when I’m working with… Read more »
We looked at quite a lot last week – still focusing on Cat Royale but also, more generally, what we enjoy or not creatively, and the platforms and spaces we may want to work in in the future. We will try imagining Cat Royale in some of those places and spaces over the next few… Read more »
The creative fortnight is something we three artists try to do at least every year. We clear the calendar of meetings and other projects getting into our heads and cut loose. We make ourselves unavailable so we can be totally available to each other. The idea is to reflect back and look forward, on… Read more »
Hear from the people we mentored in 2020, and who in turn have helped mentor us. As we all dig into our deep reservoirs of being human, of having compassion and re-prioritising our capacity, we are trying to make new shapes and ways of experiencing life, asking questions and finding new possible pathways…. Read more »
Watch: WHO expert Dr Mike Ryan is leading the fight against COVID-19 12th March 2020 In the current climate of fear and uncertainty around COVID-19 and the misinformation and fake news which can distort our understanding of the spread of the virus, we wanted to share our work on infectious disease, in the hope… Read more »
Blast Theory has a long history of making social and political work, drawing on popular culture, performance, technology and games. Our new video gives a taste of some of the projects and people over the years that have made Blast Theory what it is. We’ve made work in all kinds of virtual and physical spaces, from… Read more »
Plastic Tiger Factory: James Shreeve While 2019 felt like a tough year across the globe, one thing that filled us with pure joy was having James Shreeve intern with us for three months. An autistic artist who often works under pseudonyms connected to science fiction motifs and cats, James’s work unites his twin obsessions… Read more »
Early in 2019, artist and Blast Theory resident Marina Wainer ran a project with the students of the Product Design course at the University of Sussex. The project resulted in several group collages about the future of nature and short videos that expand on the content. The work contributed to the ‘future’ section of the… Read more »
Stepping into the main gallery at Brighton Museum is like entering an oasis of calm. Couples talk in low voices as they pull open drawers and peer into cabinets. Teenagers whisper to their classmates to ask what they’re supposed to do here. Grandparents distract children with centuries worth of artefacts from the museum’s peculiar assembly… Read more »
Gift will be available to try at the Munch Museum until March 2020. Our museum app Gift is now available to try at the Munch Museum in Oslo. Visitors to ‘Everything We Own – the Art of Edvard Munch and More’ will be able to select paintings and objects from the collection and send them… Read more »
We have been inviting you all to ask the artists and team here questions (absolutely anything!) relating to our practice, and have been sharing these in our monthly mailouts. Realising how hard it is to get our answers into a couple of sentences, we have decided to publish the full unadulterated versions here in our… Read more »
I arrived at 20 Wellington Road with the intention of writing a new project. Entitled at the time (No)Man’s Land, the starting point was rather a question: what if natural elements had legal status? The terrace at 20 Wellington Road As the title was pretty confusing, at the time of applying for the residency, I… Read more »
We’re thrilled to welcome our new resident Cat Jones who joins us as part of the international residency program from pvi collective and in partnership with the Australia Council. Cat will be working on a new project Medicament for your Predicament, resulting from her Create NSW Fellowship examining medicine and feminist futures, as supported by Create NSW…. Read more »
Operation Black Antler is an immersive theatre piece in which the audience are tasked with infiltrating a protest group. In collaboration with Hydrocracker, we are bringing the work to the Southbank Centre in April. I want to explain why I believe this is an important time to tackle issues of undercover policing and why Operation… Read more »
– Matt Locke is Director of Storythings, Deputy Chair of British Science Association and also runs The Story. A couple of years ago, I tried to rob a bank. I spent a dusky early evening walking around the city, following instructions over my phone. I met up with a stranger in a desolate parking lot and together… Read more »
With our collaborators Hydrocracker, we have just launched Operation Black Antler – an immersive theatre work in which members of the public are invited to go undercover at a protest meeting on the fringes of British society. Like many of the projects we’ve made, it is a risky work that puts the audience in… Read more »
From VR warfare installations, to interrogations at the Venice Biennale about political violence, our work with the University of Nottingham’s Mixed Reality Lab has produced 12 new works since the nineties. We’re celebrating the 20th anniversary by taking a look back at some of them. Our development as a group of artists working with… Read more »
Our development as a group of artists working with technology has been made possible by, to our knowledge, the longest and deepest collaboration between an artists’ group and a university in the world. Working closely together, we have created 12 new artworks – from VR warfare installations, to interrogations at the Venice Biennale… Read more »
Like every charity we rely on volunteers. Countless people help us out for nothing. But this year we set out to offer paid internships too: to make sure that the opportunities we can offer also go to people who cannot afford to give their time for free. With the support of amazingly generous donors we… Read more »
On October 14th, Europe’s first ever interactive feature film Bloodyminded was broadcast live from an army base to cinemas and online. 126,000 people around the world have viewed the film online so far, and up to 1,000 people watched on the night in cinemas across Europe. The film broke new ground in artistic and technical ambition…. Read more »
…like a shot of adrenaline straight to your moral compass. Circles and Stalls Operation Black Antler’s latest run in Manchester is receiving great reviews, with audiences and critics commenting on the show’s ability to make you question yourself and the role of surveillance in our society. Manchester Evening News commented “Difficult, disturbing, challenging – one… Read more »
– A guest blog by Caleb Lewis It starts with a text message. You don’t recognise the number. But they seem to know you. It’s Luke, a guy you used to go to school with. You didn’t know him very well. In fact you’d forgotten all about him. But he remembers you. And he needs… Read more »
– A guest blog by Sofia Romualdo As a former art curator turned PhD researcher, who studies the use of videogames and gameful design as interpretation and engagement tools in museums, one of my main interests is play. Playing is a natural instinct in humans and many animals. Its benefits are well known, even if,… Read more »
The thought of seeing a production with audience participation – my participation – would have been bad enough, but the word “immersive” really set me on edge. However with a family member in the Operation Black Antler ensemble cast, attendance was compulsory. There was something else as well – the subject matter was far from… Read more »
– a guest blog by Alinah Azadeh For many years I have made work – installations, sculptures, performances – which have been sparked by my own personal narratives – as a bridge for the public to bring their own stories to the work, through objects or texts and latterly, by performing them with me. I… Read more »
– a guest blog by Sarah-Jayne Butler, cast member for Operation Black Antler As an actor a huge draw to this project was the opportunity to work collaboratively, creating a piece of work that seeks to challenge and question our own perceptions and understanding rather than to offer answers. No script to hide behind, no… Read more »
Here’s a few images from my whirlwind introduction to Indonesia courtesy of the British Council. Alongside a group of seven from the UK, I travelled from the megacity of Jakarta to Yogyakarta to present some of Blast Theory’s projects and meet artists working with digital media, then to a short residency in the village of Jatiwangi and finally to Bandung… Read more »
Tomorrow I am going for 10 days to the world’s second-largest and second-most-populous continent in the world, according to Wikipedia, I am going to Africa. I have never been there before and I am trying to work out in advance what it is that “Playable Cities” means to me, in relation to Lagos. It’s only… Read more »
We have just launched our next project, Operation Black Antler – an immersive theatre work in which members of the public are invited to go undercover at a protest meeting. Like many of the projects we’ve made, it is a risky work that puts the audience in a situation they would not normally be in…. Read more »
Blast Theory will be exactly 25 on the 10th April this year. Here are the minutes from the first ever meeting we had: Wednesday April 10th 1991 8-11pm 284 Caledonian Road Matt Adams,Helen Hitchin, Niki Jewitt, Michelle Williams, Ju Row Farr, Will Kittow, Robin Tomens, Lorraine Hall Matt and Ju gave brief description of… Read more »
– a guest blog by Rachel Henson I like finding ways through an unfamiliar place. There’s a shift to a kind of all-around alertness which charges the location. It’s like a film I’m walking through, a visceral, and felt-in-the-body experience. I need tools that use this shift; that work with, rather than suspend, our heightened… Read more »
We run workshops and smaller projects quite a lot and I think they sometimes go unnoticed amongst Blast Theory’s bigger projects. So it’s really great to be running Apps for Art and Artists here in our studio in March – specially created, on our own terms, building out from our processes and projects such as… Read more »
– a guest blog by Thanos Polymeneas Liontris This short text is a reflection on contemporary approaches to Music Theatre. In order not to cause misunderstandings I need to clarify that by music theatre I do not mean Musical i.e. the performances one can see in West End and Broadway, but rather experimental music theatre… Read more »
Last night I met the team, a wonderful group of people on this independent Mesa, who have signed up to go on a journey into the unknown with Blast Theory with me at the helm. Everyone has a great wealth of experience and knowledge in many areas from advertising, to research, photography to journalism, semiotics… Read more »
OK, so this is going to be more than just a workshop, let me explain a little. This is an invitation by Mesa e Cadeira to make something, a project, something we’ve never made before, that we’ve always wanted to, with an invited group of people, on no money, in 5 days, which has social… Read more »
It has been proposed that our digital information will last longer than we will ourselves in the flesh. The average person spends 2 hours and 25 minutes per day using social networks, 80% of people use their mobiles to update their online identity on Twitter whilst on the move and 70 million photos are sent… Read more »
It’s all about processes for me this month – I’ve just finished a months unexpected studio residency here at Blast Theory. I generally work in video, with an initial background in photography and an increasing focus on installation. I’m interested in text and the role of language and different forms of story telling and histories… Read more »
My One Demand may be our most ambitious project to date – I feel like I’ve said this before, but this is certainly pushing all of our boats way out. Work with the cast is well underway, we are sorting out the live link to the cinema, the codes for playing online, how to move… Read more »
Our latest work Karen is an app that uses psychological profiling techniques to adapt the story to you. We worked extensively with researchers including Geraldine Nichols, Professor Nina Reynolds and Dr Kelly Page to understand the origin and development of psychological profiling and to uncover the subjectivity and distortion that exists in personality profiling. In this short… Read more »
Our latest work Karen is a mixture of game play and storytelling. In creating the app, we wanted to deliver a rich plot and complex emotion whilst still allowing players some control over how the story would unfold. In this short vlog, Blast Theory artist Matt Adams gives an insight into how the app allows… Read more »
In October 2014 we ran a crowdfunding campaign to fund the minimum amount of development time needed to deliver our new artistic app Karen. Thanks to our incredible audiences, old and new, we successfully hit our target and then some. We are now deep in development, with the artists only coming up for air to… Read more »
In 2012 we began collaborating with fellow Brighton based company Hydrocracker. Led by Jem Wall and Richard Hahlo, Hydrocracker have produced a number of compelling site specific theatre pieces. New World Order was a fantastic production in Brighton Town Hall and Shoreditch Town Hall that mixed several Harold Pinter plays; the audience began above… Read more »
One of the romances of writing is in the simplicity of tools required. As long as you are equipped with a writing device containing some kind of ink or carbon and a surface to depress it on – you can write – and carried with you, this action of writing can be undertaken almost anywhere…. Read more »
A year ago Matt began editing the footage from Nagoya, of the trawler being moved onto the land, through the night and across the park – 5 days to edit, then straight back to Japan on the 5th of August, to install onto 40 tablets in Japanese and English, train invigilators, meet press, thank everyone… Read more »
Last week we spent five days doing research and development on a new project. I worked with John Hunter, with Ju, Sarah and Liat from Blast Theory to explore the possibility of a new documentary work about the intersection between the Krautrock school of German music and the radical left wing opposition in West Germany from the… Read more »
I am reading The Gift (Forms and Functions of Exchange in Archaic Society) by Marcel Mauss at the moment, ongoing research for a yet undefined project and just wanted to share a quote from the introduction section. It is written by E.E. Evans-Pritchard. “But he not only wrote about the social solidarity and collective sentiments. … Read more »
In April and May this year I was lucky enough to once more be one of Blast Theory’s artists in residence. I of course have been one before and this is because I tend to stay for short periods of time every now and again as opposed to being one of their longer stay resident… Read more »
Blast Theory are currently here at Cambridge Junction as we open Rider Spoke tonight, as part of the city’s Velo Festival, celebrating the Tour de France coming to Cambridge on Monday. Liat was writing her questions for the Long Live the Vortex! blog and had a PDF of BLAST open on her laptop… All these memories came flooding back of writing my… Read more »
On July 2nd 1914 BLAST, Wyndham Lewis’s Vorticist’s literary magazine, was first published. Blast Theory’s name comes from the manifesto found in the magazine, where the Vorticists name a long list of things that should be ‘Blasted’ and things that should be ‘Blessed’. Being the publication’s 100th year anniversary I took the chance to read… Read more »
Sometimes it’s good to go to a place where there are few distractions. A place without windows – where you can’t see the world outside and the only option is to sit there, with yourself and the walls. “Hello walls (hello hello) how things go for you today?” Blast Theory had such a space that… Read more »
We’ve just had Nina Reynolds and Kelly Page here for two days. Nina is a Professor of Marketing at the University of Southampton and Kelly is an Assistant Professor in Arts Entertainment and Media Management at Columbia College Chicago. We’re collaborating together on a commission for the National Theatre of Wales. We’ve been working on… Read more »
This is an open letter in response to blogs by Bryony Kimmings and Andy Field about money. Dear Andy (who I know) and Bryony (who I don’t), Thanks a lot for your posts. It’s great to talk more about money. Most artists shy away from it and it doesn’t do us any good at all…. Read more »
So we’ve been in Buffalo at University at Buffalo for about a week working with a fantastic and smart group of people in media studies, visual studies and theatre studies courtesy of the lovely Mark Shepard and Sarah Bay-Cheng. We also did a lecture and studio visits and broke down Ulrike And Eamon Compliant into… Read more »
Fixing Point is sold out at this years’ Brighton Festival already, which is amazing, and so I wanted to let you know a few things about the work before I go into lock down mode. I feel especially excited about our collaboration with Chris Clark the electronic musician on Fixing Point. He is a fantastic… Read more »
Today I’ve been watching some of Alan Clarke’s amazing films about Northern Ireland. Elephant (1989) is a classic. So much so, that Gus Van Sant lifted the title and some aspects of the cinematography for his 2003 film about a high school massacre. Alan Clarke’s original is a very different, more challenging film. I can’t think of… Read more »
The next day I did an interview with Daisuke Oono, a journalist with NHK who is from the Sendai area. He was on the scene immediately after the tsunami struck. He spoke honestly and movingly about the tension between being a journalist and a human being in that situation. Most strikingly, he described the immediate… Read more »
Up at 5am today to head north by car. By 8.30 we were at the port of Kesennuma to see the most surreal and vivid expression of the force of the tsunami. A large freighter rests at least 500 metres from the nearest water. For the first time today – but not the last –… Read more »
Some days make me realise all over again what a privilege it is to be an artist. I’ve spent the day being shown around the tsunami impact zone just outside Sendai. We are researching a new project for the Aichi Triennale in 2013 and I’ve come to the area to learn more about the wider… Read more »
Today, I’m working on a new project for National Theatre Wales. It doesn’t even have a stable title yet but we’re looking at questionnaires and personality profiling. As so often is the way I found my way back to Adam Curtis. Marx may have provided the best analysis for economic and political realities in the… Read more »