participatory virtual experiences

 The Imaginary Futures project, which was deliberately produced to be viewed and participated on teleconferencing applications, invites viewers and participants to engage in a uniquely participatory experience. Participants are guided by the many collaborating artists in the virtual collection of sites. These sites are displayed through the thumbnails of the gallery view of the online meeting and pinned display screen from a cacophony of sound and scenes to a dark and soothing cocoon. I highly recommend making use of two screens, to be able to view both the curation of Marcus Neustetter and the hive of movement and interlaced thumbnails of performances by each collaborating artist. 

Lyrene Kühn-Botma

IMAGINARY FUTURES was quite awesome... and evolutionary. Marcus is experimenting between the live, and the recorded and interactive participation which becomes integrated as part of screened performances which are 'scripted' yet the actions and visuals, the soundscapes, the moving bodies, the sculptural architectures are interlayered multsensual sequences serendipitouly evolving to create emergent vistas and collective choreographies to inspire and activate new modes of seeing, being, knowing, feeling.  This is an orchestratration of Zoom with improvising and spotlighting of music, song, performance dance, markmaking and video footage ... Marcus is co-curating and conducting living collages with his fellow South African artists/students... it is artful heart activism with extraordinary visual power and haunting vocals which convey uplifting narratives and mythopoetic realities to guide us into our forward days of the renewed.

Miche and Flora or TOUCHSTONES EARTH

The performance contained beautiful visuals, special iconography, and sound, aside from smell it interacted with all the senses. 

Which is interesting considering that it was communicated across a virtual platform. It was moving, and made me want to cry in parts, it also felt like it cut very close to the razors edge between apocalyptic and survival. Making it in parts an uncomfortable experience. Much like the realities we are all adapting to today. It was interactive, integrated when it needed to be, disconnected when discord was needed. The digital choreography complex.

There are fragments of the performance that will remain in my memory for a long time - the cycle of the dying/living naartjie, the globes of paint, paint rising to the surface and umbrella satellites. The shadows, voices, dancers and holograms looking inward, carefully contrived instillations/sculptural maps/counting days/moments in time, talking about narratives of past, present and future - explorers inward looking, outward looking, living now. 

2 minutes post performance, my aunt says to me: that was very interesting, I am not sure what it was about - but it was visually interesting.  We agree it was layered with an number of hidden meanings, several that were very personal to the collaborators/explorers. 

2.5 hours post performance, my aunt says to me: that was amazing, I really enjoyed the journey.  I still feel a bit emotionally fragile, as if it revealed a narrative that I see out the corner of my eye everyday on the news.  The light fractures of hope were special, we were transported into a new world of light and hope. 

I cannot imagine how complex it was to pull off a digital/virtual process such as this - facing the challenges of daily life in South Africa, across the seas and regions. It takes a brave group of explorers to lead us into the light, which is what you did, through creative expression and vulnerability.

Pauline Borton 

My immediate responses: The experience is very moving and thought provoking tackling challenging and very relevant themes. It was amazing to see diverse art forms, communities and social perspectives involved and the engagement felt very authentic and consultative. It felt like artists were presenting their own ideas and their talents. I felt inspired by the talent and very proud of the young voices coming through. From a technical perspective I was really aware that these artists couldn’t possibly have been together in the same space to discuss/rehearse yet we felt there was a real connection throughout the event. The raw and experimental format really worked and actually reflected the unknown territory we find ourselves in right now.

Jenni Lewin-Turner

Sitting far away, in the absence of an observatory dome, , I ‘zoomed’ into Marcus and his Imaginary Futures collaborators performance. My dining room walls, table and chairs; the location of my office and studio, and for the duration of the performance my auditorium too. 

In place of the enveloping atmosphere of an observatory or planetarium, as I experienced some years ago during an immersive audio-visual performance by Marcus in Observatory, Johannesburg, the delivery of Imaginary Futures on my computer screen brought forth a synthetic collage - combining visual experimentation with fracture, spatial distance and play. All the while I was conscious of the fact that Marcus was running the performance from his studio in Vienna, with performers situated in Bloemfontein and content streaming from various camera perspectives and hard drives in varying locations in South Africa. These circumstances coupled with the video mixing methods rendered on sceen, engendered a complex but compelling process of interpretation and a stitching together of new narratives, unfolding in what presented as real time. 

As the performance continued, streamed content shifted from daytime to nighttime, while a typical European summer evening persisted in Vienna, and in Ireland where I was sitting. 

The absence of an ocular like standing or seating layout, as one might find in a planetarium, gave way to a fourth wall comprised of multiple, distinct and different spaces, all the while, I couldn’t take my eyes off the real time footage (I learned later) of two figures, separated by a domestic security gate. One performer on the outside of an apartment, the other on the inside. This frustrated dance of entanglement and division, reinforced by the square tube grid of the gate, remains for me a succinct and potent expression of our current times.

Over the years I have witnessed and observed numerous durational performances by Marcus, where a combination of found objects, video projection and toy LED lights provide the source and ambient for experimental narrative; as Marcus immerses his body and intuition into an often highly unpredictable performative situation and spectacle. 

Imaginary Futures on the other hand had to surrender to the often-one-dimensional world of streaming technology in an effort to connect festival audiences. If anything, this present form of creative content consumption has altogether flattened my psychological and emotional world.

Interestingly though, powerful images remain, and instead of a journey through space, time and potential other worlds as one would come to expect from the promise of discovery in the night sky, Marcus and his team of futurist imagineers offered up a fantastical and perhaps unintentional geography lesson, a survey of place and people, replete with their own distinct atmospheres and forms of expression. A science meets art experiment, where 

inadvertently I was able to travel, not through the night sky, but through fragments of place, memory, recollection and the spherical space of my minds eye, compositing meaning as the virtual field of the performance stretched out.

Stephen Hobbs

This past week I had the intriguing and instructive pleasure of being a ‘participant observer’ in Marcus Neustetter’s Imaginary Futures. 

The Endeavour: to explore the limits and capacities of Zoom as a forum for creative exploration and invention. 

Over the past seven months or so, there has been a global surge to online trafficking of knowledge, opinion, and community through the internet. Neustetter’s forum has embraced the opportunity to consider how the regularized, 2-dimensional rectangles of digital space on the Zoom screen might be used to generate playfulness and mutuality. 

The Process: I observed an online performance (which had participants from across South Africa, and participating audiences from North America, Europe, East, West and Southern Africa) who became improvisatory peers, trying to work out the meanings inherent in the medium of the split screen. Neustetter has, over the past weeks, drawn together approximately twenty to thirty participants who spend an hour in the darkness in front of a radiant screen (which, by convention, drains energy and animated spontaneity out of the viewer.) With an assembled list of props (suggested in online communications in advance of the session) we all arrived at the portal of our screens, with flashlights, a drinking glass, a sheet of blank paper. Meanwhile Neustetter had over the previous weeks assembled an array of video materials generated by members of the ‘playing’ cohort – sequences that might be projected in one frame as a kind of projected architecture of the event; another, constructed of worked forms, improvisational dances, miniature landscapes. Over the course of the evening our Host conjured the interplay of various visual fields – working to resist the ‘natural habit’ of the Zoom technology’s selection process that follows a programmed form through which one speaker may succeed another, in Zoom preferences, with bodies and voices in the various frames struggling to create the illusion of interchange. 

At times, too, Neustetter conducted us, using various digital prompts and triggers to impel one screen to take over from another; and at certain moments we were enjoined to strike up a choral note, allowing voices to intermingle across vast voids of digital space separating us. There was an unusual sense, for such digital moments, that the ‘whole’ was more meaningful than the sum of its parts: the screen events flowed and surged, in an organic rhythm, creating a multi-tiled platform, where performers at times followed one another, at times spilled onto the screen simultaneously, like a sound-enriched tapestry, of figure, ground, sound, light and darkness. 

The Analysis: On the day after this performance Neustetter hosted a workshop in which he and the participants looked back on what they had experienced through the process of making. There were very thoughtful comments, for example, from one member who has been working with Neustetter, despite having no formal arts education, who described the pleasure of having his constructed matrix digitally activated online as a “virtual set” for this multi-national performance, through the illusionism of camera-work and simultaneous screens. Neustetter reflected on the potential and possibilities of working with pre-recorded sequences, that could be dropped in via Virtual Backgrounds, to create a sense of narrative potentialities inside the live and seemingly random event. There was a discussion of the levels of trust inside this virtual space with various performers commenting on the pleasures of the vulnerability of ‘being inside’ a working process that was genuinely a collective responsibility.

Jane Taylor LoKO (laboratory of Kinetic Object, Centre for Humanities Research, University of the Western Cape)