SHOWING WITHOUT GOING

Connections

Approaches

Instructions to Imagine

There are examples of artworks involving instructions which are perhaps only meant to be read or heard, the result of acting upon them left to your own imagination. Perhaps useful to remember: being given an instruction, being told to do something - this of course is real, and it has an effect, regardless of whether or not you carry it out. 

#participation

 

Examples

Surrender Control

Tim Etchells

https://timetchells.com/projects/surrender-control/

Surrender Control is an interactive work comprising an escalating sequence of text message instructions delivered direct to the mobile phones of individual users. Participants subscribe to the project by sending a message to a particular number and from that point on receive a certain number of text message instructions over a specified time period (for example – 75 instructions over 5 days). Responding to the intimate context of the mobile phone and of SMS as a form of communication, Surrender Control invites the user into an evolving game of textual suggestions, provocations and dares.

Spectrums

Active audience

mentally active
physical active

Spectrums

Addressing absence and distance in the work

Address as an explicit content
Address as implicit content

Spectrums

Control

Lost
Total

Questions

Time and space shared

If one of the core aspects often seen to define live performance is collective, shared experience of time and space, how might SWG approaches lead to a disappearance of the audience as a collective, and of performance as a shared effort? On the other hand, what novel relationships with time and space might they propose?