:11.2007 Interview with Blast Theory
www.blasttheory.co.uk
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Blast Theory is a London-based artists’ group known for their live art projects, which are similar to happenings or role plays and explore the interactive possibilities offered by new technologies like computers, mobile phones and wi-fi networks. The group emerged from the post-theatre scene and currently consists of a 6-member team led by Matt Adams, Ju Row Farr and Nick Tandavanitj. Blast Theory won the coveted Prix Ars Electronica Golden Nica for Interactive Art in 2003, and the group were one of the main attractions at Always On, the SonarMatica 2006 exhibition on localisation-based works, where they presented their latest project: Day of the Figurines.

What is Blast Theory? Where are you coming from and which are your objectives?

Ju, Nick and I have worked together for over 15 years. We collaborate   very closely with each other and with others, especially the Mixed Reality Lab at the University of Nottingham. We're fascinated by the intersection between popular culture and social and political realities. Our early performances used many media, interaction with the audience, vox pops and documentary techniques. For example, Chemical Wedding in 1992 looked at the overlap between computer
viruses and the Human Immunodeficiency Virus (HIV) and how ideas of medical panic were memes that were transmitted across time.

We've always been committed to reaching a specific audience. Marketing, branding and audience interviews have been recurrent threads and spill out into the themes of our work. Who do you talk to? What can be said? and what are the political implications of those questions? Lately this has prompted us to place the audience themselves ever more centrally inside the work itself.

Since about 2000 we have often used mobile devices as the platform for exploring these ideas. And pieces like Can You See Me Now? and Uncle Roy All Around You were mixed reality games in which virtual worlds online combined with players on the street. Real cities and virtual cities were overlaid on top of one another and the audience inhabited them as players, actors and participants.

Alongside these large scale complex works made in collaboration we've also developed works for galleries. TRUCOLD is a video installation shown at the Sydney Biennale in which Karlsruhe and London at night, sometimes in fog, were filmed on a very slow shutter speed. Single Story Building has been presented on screen and also via Tate Online
on the phone. The audience navigate through hundreds of choices to drill down into very private spaces beginning with the first question: Urban or Rural?

We remain fascinated by the multiplicity of communication pathways that exist, their limitations and their promises. Given the ideologies inscribed into, for example, the computer how might we best use these devices?


What it was your participation last year in sonar? What did you do?

We presented a test version of Day Of The Figurines over the three days. Day Of The Figurines is an SMS game set in a fictional town that is littered, dark and underpinned with steady decay. The game unfolds
over a total of 24 days, each day representing an hour in the life of the town as it shifts from the mundane to the cataclysmic: the local vicar opens a summer fete, Scandinavian metallists play a gig at the Locarno that goes horribly wrong while an invading army appears on the High Street. How players respond to these events and to each
other creates and sustains a community during the course of a single day in the town. 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 nature
of public participation within artworks and within electronic spaces (here, through SMS). It uses emergent behaviour and social dynamics as a means of structuring a live event. It invites players to establish their own codes of behaviour and morality within a parallel world.

What are your current and next projects?

We are currently developing three works. Prof Tanda is a mobile phone game made in collaboration with the World Wildlife Fund and partners in the Participate project. Prof Tanda contacts you via your phone to ask you questions once or twice a day. He is interested in who you are and how you live but always takes a pretty oblique angle. First
of all he guesses your gender by asking you about your favourite animal, then he starts trying to work out when you're at work and how you get there. As the days pass he builds a picture of you and starts to ask questions about your environmental impacts but always in his own playful style. He doesn't try to change your behaviour but he
does draw your attention to it and he's never short of an interesting fact.

The game uses the IDs that each mobile phone mast has to make his guesses more intelligent. As your phone moves around it will connect to the nearest mast. Because each mast has a unique cell ID your phone essentialy records your location. However the mobile phone operators hold the information about which cell ID is related to which specific location (and only sell this data at great expense) so Prof Tanda doesn't know where you actually are. Instead the game just looks at patterns of movement and makes inferences from that. It uses the phones underlying surveillance of your behaviour, makes it more visible and uses it to tailor environmental information to you.

The second piece we're developing is a game for the Sony PSP to be played by motorists in Los Angeles. Having done a range of projects aimed at pedestrians in the city we thought it would interesting to look at an urban landscape in which the pedestrian is almost non existent. Because we've been so fascinated in the social impacts of
mobile communication devices - especially how they change our notions of strangers, intimacy and trust - we're excited to look at a fundamentally antisocial medium: the car. Can we make something interesting about the borders between total privacy, public display, individual agency and the constraints of continuous traffic jams?

Finally we're developing a television project in New York called Danger Game. We can't say much about the project except that we've shot 15 minutes of material so far and that we'll be producing a pilot episode in the spring.


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