#blasttheory

It's #VolunteersWeek! A massive thank you to all of our amazing #BlastTheory volunteers so far in 2019 – Katrine, Leonardo, Lizzie and our newest arrival, Keziah💫 pic.twitter.com/UhqIeQu1O1

Happy New Year from Blast Theory. Thanks to everyone for making 2017 such a fantastic year!! http://pic.twitter.com/KAGh7McSbr

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Project Proposal – 16/11/15

Charlotte Goodlad, Jess Chaney, Simon Bedwell & Yanzhe Zhao

The performance will be held in Quad South Hall 15/1/16.

As a collective of four we will be collaborating in order to ask the questions; how much of a role can the audience have on a live piece of performance? Could the audience/text be considered the 5th performer? It is important to note that over the process these questions will develop to become more specific, they may even change completely dependent on our practical involvement.

We will attempt to answer these questions through the use of audience participation and an interactive stage design. The material will be formed through the use of recycling and reusing game strategies in order to encourage a playful dynamic between to collective. The notion of ‘recycling’ will have a major role within our process. By ‘recycle’ we mean collaborating with texts and materials that already exist in the world in order to produce a new image. We will recycle in order to resound to reform. Materials created thus far such as; scores, texts and structures will be used partly as starting points to begin making.

Conceptually we will attempt to achieve an amalgamation between the themes and languages from Macbeth as well as, considering collaboration as a concept in order to discuss political and militant current affairs. These are initial concepts and will become more specific and defined as the process continues.

Imagine a world where we obtain mentors, friends, and lovers simply by installing them onto our phone. This is the concept being explored by UK based art group Blast Theory. They are a group of interactive artists that developed Karen, a fictional life-coaching app which just launched that blurs the line between computer and human relationships.

Karen is designed to be experienced over the course of a week, and consists of HD video interactions between an actress, posing as life coach, and the user. Participants begin the experience by answering personal questions that dig at the users general worldview and emotional attitudes: Do you consider yourself an optimist? Did you have a happy childhood? In addition to answering a string of personal questions, participants willingly allow Karen to closely monitor their daily phone activities. She lures you in with the promise that the more you share with her, the more she'll reveal things to you about yourself that perhaps you never knew. The experience develops differently for each user based on the information provided to Karen. She is also programmed to gradually reveal things about her own life and cross professional boundaries. At the end of the experience, participants receive a psychological assessment and are left with a presumingly uncomfortable feeling that begs us to examine our relationship to our devices. It’s a social art experiment resembling the Turing Test, which proposes that the threshold for artificial intelligence is when we can no longer judge whether we’re interacting with a computer or a real person.

For the art community, the app is an interesting proposition in that it’s one of the first apps to provide a new stage for performance art – highly conceptual art that explores basic elements having to do with time, space, and the relationship between performers and their audience. In true meta fashion, the artists behind Karen are making a statement about the dependencies created by the role of technology in our lives, but are using that same technology to express it.

For brands, this is as a cautionary tale. The more people are willing to share their personal data (and this is especially true of Gen Z) the more the data can be used to tell a compelling story that transforms to become highly individualized and personal. At worst, the data can also be used in ways that come across manipulative and insincere.