The interesting thing is where you don't set up or script the entire experience but script the conditions by which multiple kinds of experiences can occur within certain constraints. The artist no longer controls the playing field. When we construct these computer systems using the most sophisticated technologies of control, the possibility of the breakdown of control lies just on horizon. You recognize that there is an inherent agency to the system that you have set up and that no one controller or interpreter is the master of that system.
Automutation
Now, in the current project M3, we are interested in games and in play, on how it possible for people to invent or change the rules in play. In order to study these kinds of activities, we could sit behind a blind and watch "the performance," writing down behaviorist descriptions of what we see. This will teach us something, but not the deepest lessons. If our project is auto-mutation — making it possible for people to change the very fabric of their world, then we cannot use the same classical notions used by "performance theory," of simply having a so-called neutral observer behind the screen, observing the performance. We really have to get in there with the players and make it possible for us and them to change the system in real time, "on the fly."
Experience
We of course are dealing with the fundamental question of the jouney of a player's experience. On one level this is interesting from the perspective of information design. For instance, how do we map (the user's)experience? How does a person construct a sensible experience as s/he moves through a space, whether that space is physical and/or media driven? How does a person make one's way in the world? This brings into play temporality, purpose, fate. Our cultural context compresses experience into a finite and bounded event, but is this necessarily so? Theater, or more specifically, what we normally think of as theater, is very slow to deal with these questions,particularly since the "conventions of space"are so rigidly defined.
You don't really find yourself in an embodied experience, because you are immobilized in a seat. Of course, we're not just talking about a theater without seats — where the action moves and you the viewer move with it or where you are "in the midst of the action." In these so-called promenade models there is still the privileging of an object (i.e.,The Performance) that you have come to watch but rarely to experience in a direct embodied action. We can look back at the whole history of optical perspective to see such vision machines in action. The interesting thing is that so many institutions which pride themselves as experimental or which appear to be interested in new cultural developments still rely on these old vision apparatuses. Many in the theater seem not particularly interested in the design and even auto-mutation of an experience.
Substrates
What we're highlighting here, is this important difference between pre-scripted experience and experience which is not pre-scripted. Conventional issues are the lines (or folds) between audience-performer, staged space and audience space, character and actor, etc. Framed against those conventions, we're asking, "Where does meaning come from?" Instead of pre-defining objects such as "actor," "spectator," or "performance," we're working at the substrate of experience — our material is a substrate in which meaning-making takes place.
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