Six visitors enter an installation space. They are instructed to remove their coats and put on black hooded jackets, before being zipped into a cubicle each. In front of them, a fine spray of water, four metres across, creates a rain-screen holding the projected image of a virtual world. For the next half an hour, the six visitors must navigate their way through the world to find a designated target, and get out. Throughout the experience, the participants meet and exchange information with each other, and are confronted by fragments of the Gulf War – including a space full of hundreds of floating numbers, each representing an estimate of Iraqi casualties.
It may sound like an awareness-raising project created in response to imminent war on Iraq, but in fact, Blast Theory’s Desert Rain has been touring the UK and internationally since 1999, clocking up nearly 2,000 performances.
Merging the worlds of theatre, installation, and computer games, Desert Rain draws on a little-known event from the 1991 Gulf War, to explore the boundaries between reality and virtuality. During the conflict, American soldiers on the USS Vincennes mistook a civilian Iraqi plane for the enemy and opened fire, killing all 270 passengers on board. The soldiers had been simulator-trained.
The piece also raises questions about our lack of information: despite the fact that some 10,000 journalists were in the field reporting, attempts by Blast Theory to verify the number of Iraqi Gulf War casualties were fruitless.
‘The idea of “knowledge” and “lack of knowledge”, [and] the boundary between reality and “virtuality” being a very slippery place, run right through Desert Rain,’ Blast Theory founder member, Matt Adams, explains.
The result of two-and-a-half years of research and development in collaboration with the University of Nottingham’s Mixed Reality Lab, the BAFTA-nominated project has placed Blast Theory at the forefront of multimedia theatre in Britain.
But now the group now looks set to pioneer a new wave of television programming in the UK – if all goes to plan with a pilot they are currently working on with BBC Interactive.
The show is based on Blast Theory’s Can You See Me Now?, a game played simultaneously on the streets and online, which received a 2002 BAFTA Interactive nomination. Adams notes that the planned interactive television show will take the ideas presented in Can You See Me Now? further. Viewers will be able to play on the streets, via interactive TV, online, or via telephone whilst watching the programme.
While so-called ‘real-tv’ models have traditionally gone down the ‘lowest common denominator’ track – reaching all-time lows of nastiness with Big Brother 3 and, most recently, Wife Swap – Adams and his Blast Theory co-members (Ju Row Farr, Nicholas Tandavanitj) favour a different model.
Adams affirms that the group wants to explore the possibility of using reality TV formats to address important social and political issues, but at the same time, engage large audiences.
‘I think the ability to create something that: works technically in the first instance, is engaging to play in the second – and then actually have something meaningful to engage an audience emotionally and intellectually, in the third – is extremely complex and demanding,’ he observes.
‘We feel we’ve satisfied the first two… We are now in the process of pushing how we can create a language out of these works that will work on people’s emotions and intellects as well.’
Blast Theory’s TV project also represents a shift in television programming which not only sees traditional televisual-based models moving to more real-time formats, but in which production companies are increasingly looking to people from technology, art and performance backgrounds for content. Farr and Adams, for example, are, respectively, an arts graduate and actor/director.
Blast Theory began life in 1991 with interactive performances like Gunmen Kill Three, in which audience members were given paintball guns and invited to ‘shoot’ at members of the cast. In 1998, after holding a lottery competition, two winners were snatched off the street by the group, and taken to a secret location for 48 hours. The project, entitled Kidnap, was broadcast over the internet and allowed users to communicate with the kidnappers, but also, control the camera in the safehouse where the captives were held.
But the group’s most successful work to date, and, Adams admits, his favourite, is Desert Rain. While the group has never shied away from confronting audiences with issues of social, cultural and political importance, the enduring relevance of this particular project is remarkable.
‘It’s been a sort of cruel irony that the prospect of war in the Middle East or in Afghanistan seems to have accompanied the project throughout its life,’ Adams remarks. ‘It’s very surreal, because when we did Desert Rain in Rotterdam, it was during the war in Afghanistan and the anthrax scare in the US. We used small boxes of sand in the show and people really felt the boxes of sand could be anthrax or representative of it,’ he recalls. ‘Now, we are in the situation where every single day the prospect of war is the backdrop to people experiencing the show – which sort of feels appropriate in one way, but deeply depressing in another.’
‘Can You See Me Now?’ will be played during the Dutch Electronic Art Festival in Rotterdam. For more information visit the festival website, deaf.v2.nl or see the Blast Theory site for details about future and past projects.