THE GLITCH

a review by Nikki van Sprundel //

As I walked in and found a seat I saw people in the audience waving with ping pong paddles. On a screen before us a game was displayed. I sat down and found my own paddle. It had a red and a green side and if you held it up in the air you could see your paddle as a red or green dot on the screen.

I tried it.

My moving dot, either red or green, did not seem to have much effect on the game. Did I do something wrong? Did I not see what it did? Or did I just not understand?

The program had said: “Three digital artists play with reality and the audience”. It made me think of a friday night two weeks before this evening. At exactly the same time, in exactly the same theater on exactly the same stage I had seen an interactive play called Blank. In this play by Nassim Soleimanpour the actor knew as little about the script as the audience, as it was given to her on stage. Where the story was made in front of and together with us.

In the meantime, at the DocLab live event the screen had stopped showing the game and we put our paddles away. We were told that we had been part of an experiment, that the point was to see how people reacted on the whole paddle thing. It seemed to work, but I still didn’t totally understand.

The evening started with Bianca Giaever (This American Life). She showed us a few of her audio driven film projects which were cute, funny and moving. I especially let a tear when she told about a girl she helped shooting a film which made her say ‘I love you’ to her boyfriend for the first time. They had been together for over 7 years, they never said it to each other. He said it back.

No matter how moved I was, it didn’t make up for the fact that this wasn’t what I had came for. Where was the performance? Why didn’t she play with the audience? She did tell us about a new interactive project she was working on, but not once we were involved in anything. The same was true for the next artist: Ant Hampton. He told us about some unique projects of his where he let people be the audience and the performer at the same time, by giving them instructions trough audio. But he never made use of the audience he had before him while telling all of this.

Maybe the play two weeks earlier had influenced my expectations on what I thought I was going to see, but the last artists did seem to understand and meet up with those expectations.

Something more up my alley was what the British duo Anagram told us about some of their projects. But they also made us understand what a glitch in reality is, by letting us experience one. Under our seat we found a box with a bandage in it. We had to put it around our left leg just above the knee. As tight as we were comfortable with. A voice filled the room and told us to close our eyes and stop moving or touching our leg. A story was told about a man who had lost his leg but who was still able to feel it. He could feel himself wiggle his toes, as could we. But how could we know that our leg was still there, while we couldn’t see it? We suddenly experienced his body through our own.

We suddenly could see his glitch.

As I cycled home through the city I thought about the glitch I had experienced. Not just the one about the leg, but my own.

In the end my expectations did match the reality of that evening, but not without a little glitch along the way.