To find out more about the film, the research behind it, and to watch excerpts go to the project website. SJ breaks into an army base to bury the ashes of her great-grandfather, Harold, a conscientious objector during the First World War. Inside, surrounded by soldiers and the ghosts of past wars, she finds a… Read more »
Visit the 2097: We Made Ourselves Over site to watch the films and learn more about the research process. 2097: We Made Ourselves Over explores the belief that everyone has the power to act and influence the future – uncovering the unnerving and exhilarating idea that anything is possible. Inspired by the respective histories of communities… Read more »
Blast Theory, acclaimed author Tony White and 30 young people aged between 14 – 19, worked together in the West Midlands at Cannock, Southwater and St John’s libraries, to re-imagine libraries, story telling and their place in the world. It culminated in a 9-hour takeover of the three libraries on the 29th of October 2016. On… Read more »
For 40 years British police officers have been undercover inside protest groups. Scandals such as Wikileaks, the Snowden affair and the revelations about the Special Demonstration Squad show that secret forces within the state have little respect for law. Co-created with critically acclaimed immersive theatre company Hydrocracker, Operation Black Antler seeks to explore this moral… Read more »
Too Much Information is an audio walk around the streets of Manchester, based on a series of frank and funny conversations between two groups of people at very different stages of their lives – a group of young adults and a group of over 60s. Posing some seemingly awkward questions, Blast Theory Artist Ju Row… Read more »
DIVO: Digital Voices unites three European organisations Blast Theory (UK), The Patchingzone (NL) and Translocal (FI) working at the leading edge of digital and interactive media to investigate new ways of working with young people and mobile media. Through research and practical public outcomes, DIVO: Digital Voices provided a platform for meaningful exchange and created… Read more »
As you hear about the progression into violence and death you stare at the everyday surroundings. Find a vantage point, linger near a doorway or to find a nearby bus shelter then use your keypad to make your choices. You hear about TV appearances, the firebombing of a supermarket and the night that Benno was… Read more »
Later a crane lifts the boat onto a lorry at the Nagoya Port and it is driven into the city centre at midnight. Crowds gather to watch along the route and as the lorry arrives at the park, the boats’ final resting place. People bring food and drink, make videos, photos, hang out, worry and… Read more »
The piece explores the conflict between viruses as a reality and virus as a metaphor in the age of HIV/AIDS. A fiercely physical piece in which performers struggle with one another, with piles of medical tomes and with the audience themselves. Throughout, two video screens regurgitate AIDS paranoia, body horror films and a hexagonal map… Read more »
Alongside a soundtrack by Bristol-based dance band Statik Sound System, anthemic tracks such as Teen Spirit by Nirvana and extreme Techno pushed both performers and audience. The performance itself – lasting 60 minutes – was fast and furious: a constant barrage of leaps, skids and falls interwoven with moments of quiet isolation and exhaustion. Stampede… Read more »
Like other pieces of this era such as Stampede and Chemical Wedding, The Gilt Remake processes popular culture to bring its social and political concerns vividly into focus.
The finished work – developed during workshops over three months – was more like a club or an exhibition than a piece of theatre. It combined performance, video, music and interactivity. You could drop into this promenade environment for 2 minutes or 2 hours over the course of the evening, and move about in an… Read more »
As Something American develops, the cop sheds his layers of pretence. He opens up, breaks down and falls away. As he does so other versions of America come through; sometimes in tiny moments, at others in a flurry of activity and pumping music. Three performers talk about boxing and Rock’n’Roll and Remote Viewing. Then the… Read more »
Drawing on intimate video interviews and circuit training, Internal Ammunition is a promenade performance fuelled by nervous energy, dance floor moves and an uncompromising challenge to each audience member. Made over a period of 12 weeks in collaboration with 3rd year degree students at Melton Mowbray College the resulting performance happened twice only and veered… Read more »
The work was subsequently shown in a pedestrian precinct in Nottingham and in a bank in Hildesheim in Germany. Looking at the obsession with crime reconstructions the piece features exploding bullet hits courtesy of a film special effects company. Lasting up to 12 hours per day the piece re-enacts a murder again and again, each… Read more »
Inspired by a sequence in the film The Abyss, where the Mary Elizabeth Mastrantonio character dies in order to save the Ed Harris character’s life and is then miraculously brought back to life and by an essay by Ptolemy Tompkins in Screen Violence, C’mon Baby Fight! Fight! Fight! was performed in Capture an evening of… Read more »
This work was performed twice. First, on the day that Princess Diana died, in a sweltering gallery at the Kunstlerhaus Bethanien in Berlin. Matt, Ju and Nick were joined by Will Kittow. A second version, in which Jamie Iddon replaced Will was shown at CASCO in Utrecht. In both versions the performers introduced their favourite… Read more »
Kidnap, a work about control and consent, was inspired by the notorious Spanner Trial in which consenting sadomasochists were convicted and sent to prison. The project launched to the press and public on 15 May 1998 and registration was open to any resident of England and Wales. Each entrant paid a fee of £10 and… Read more »
Three booths in CASCO gallery in Utrecht are connected. One booth is for the interviewer. It has a monitor, a pair of headphones and a microphone. By switching a button the interviewer can connect to one of the other booths. They have a pair of headphones, a microphone and a camera. When your booth is selected… Read more »
The second part of the project was a deeper investigation into the nature of the site with a travelogue/questionnaire on audio cassette. Members of the public walked through the site wearing a personal stereo with given instructions and questions. The questions were imaginatively constructed to encourage the user to think about their built environment in… Read more »
This project was the second major collaboration with the Mixed Reality Lab at the University of Nottingham after Desert Rain. It was developed during a long period of research and development in London and Nottingham exploring Global Positioning Systems and wireless networking. Can You See Me Now? takes the fabric of the city and makes… Read more »
The city is an arena where the unfamiliar flourishes, where the disjointed and the disrupted are constantly threatening to overwhelm us. It is also a zone of possibility; new encounters. Building on Can You See Me Now? the game investigates some of the social changes brought about by ubiquitous mobile devices, persistent access to a… Read more »
At each end of the space is a laptop showing video excerpts from Return of the Living Dead Part II, Weekend, Alphaville and Bande à Part. Actors fight, cower, run, act the fool, dance, play dead, stagger down corridors and watch aerobics on TV. In silence, three performers – Paul Dungworth, Sheila Ghelani and Matt… Read more »
The game invites players to search for Frank through the streets of Adelaide. Online Players move through a virtual model of the city, opening location specific photos. One photo reveals the location of a hidden object. Online Players then enlist a Street Player to go to that location and retrieve it. In the Exeter Hotel,… Read more »
The goal of the game is to ‘help other people’ but it is not necessarily clear how to do this. From the Gasometer to Product Barn, the Canal to the Rat Research Institute, up to 1,000 players roam the streets, defining themselves through their interactions. Day Of The Figurines continues Blast Theory’s enquiry into the… Read more »
Rider Spoke continues our fascination with how games and new communication technologies create novel social spaces where the private and the public intertwine. To cycle alone, in the evening, with no particular destination offers a rare freedom. In Rider Spoke this is combined with an opportunity to think about the people in your life and… Read more »
A description of the work The development of the work was supported by Caitlin Newton Broad who visited a huge range of community groups, colleges and arts organisations in the East End to invite young people to a series of workshops at the Urban Adventure Base over the summer of 2008. Eight people were chosen… Read more »
The work has 11 terminals arranged around the central atrium of the gallery. Each is equipped with a monitor, a motorised pan-tilt camera and a footpad interface in the floor. Visitors create avatars which they’re able to fly around the atrium using the footpad. The camera tracks their position as they fly; crashing into other… Read more »
Made over the summer of 1991 by Matt Adams, Lorraine Hall, Niki Jewett, Will Kittow and Ju Row Farr in collaboration with Lucia Gahlin, Nicky Gibbs and Bruce Gilchrist. The development of the piece was prompted by an article in The Guardian entitled Gunmen Kill Three at Mobile Shop which described in detail how two… Read more »
“one of the most complex and powerful responses to the first Gulf War to be produced within the sphere of theatrical practice.” Gabriella Giannachi, Virtual Theatres Desert Rain was, in part, a response to the assertion by French cultural theorist Jean Baudrillard that ‘the Gulf War did not take place‘ because it was a… Read more »
10 Backwards draws on a long tradition of scifi to tell the story of Niki as she learns to travel in time and then arrives back in the present with a deteriorating illness of deja vu and spatial displacement. The show mixed live and recorded video – much of it shot in a startling fog… Read more »
A Machine To See With is a Locative Cinema commission from the Sundance Film Festival, 01 San Jose Biennial and the Banff New Media Institute. It was created between January and September 2010 and premiered in San Jose on 16th September. It is a film where you play the lead. You sign up online and… Read more »
Fixing Point is an audio walk about Seamus Ruddy made in collaboration with electronic musician Clark. This work was first shown at Snape Maltings in Suffolk. The Maltings focus on a programme of classical music in an idyllic rural setting. However the area has a strong military history with experimental installations at Orford Ness and an American nuclear base… Read more »
A description of the work in Venice The work starts in Palazzo Zenobio where you enter a wooden room, which has air holes drilled into it, and pick up a mobile phone. There is a screen on the wall showing video of an interview – the interview is live and you can faintly hear the… Read more »
I’d Hide You originates from a research project into Outside Broadcasting funded by the Technology Strategy Board. We worked with London TV company Somethin’ Else and the University of Nottingham to develop a low cost interactive platform for Outside Broadcasting. At the end of the twelve months we wanted to create a simple game that… Read more »