Boomtown Fair is more than a music festival with a bit of performance tacked on – it’s a full-on five-day immersive theatre event which invites you in to a living, breathing, fictitious city. Dorothy Max Prior talks to the festival’s narrative director Doug Francisco, to performer Ciaran Hammond, and to ‘citizen’ Frank Foster-Prior to hear their individual stories

‘A world of unity, creativity and freedom is what we aspire to achieve from our make-believe city’ says the Boomtown website. Founded in 2009, and set in the beautiful surroundings of the South Downs National Park in Hampshire, the festival titles each edition with a chapter number – emphasising Boomtown as an ongoing narrative. The 2019 edition, held 7–11 August, was called Chapter 11: A Radical City – festival attendees are encouraged to see themselves as ‘citizens’.

The ‘city’ is made up of distinct districts which have evocative names, such as Oldtown, Paradise Heights, Metropolis, and Copper County. Each district has at least one main stage and a selection of smaller street or theatrical venues, as well as small and medium-sized music venues.

There are also large stage areas (Lion’s Den, Town Centre, and RELIC) which are more like traditional music festival main stages – they accommodate crowds several thousand strong, with vast stage sets at the centre, and food and drink outlets.

Boomtown Fair. Photo Charlie Raven

Each of the ‘districts’ has its own narratives and characters, made up from a massive pool of theatre companies, circus performers, and installation artists that help with the unravelling of a city-wide grand narrative which comes to a finale on the last day: ‘In following a particular mission or quest, audiences can traverse the entire festival, travelling between high-tech utopias, to a reconstruction of the Wild West, into a holiday land for filthy rich socialites from the 1980s, and finishing up in a cage in a pirate’s den. Interactions they encounter along the way range from intimate one-on-one installations, to helping to stage large outdoor happenings.’ (Boomtown website).

Performer Ciaran Hammond explains further:

‘Boomtown is split into districts which all have their own style and personality. This year, I was working in Paradise Heights, the uptown holiday-home for the uber-elite characters of Boomtown – and there were around 180 immersive actors in our district alone. Each district is comprised of outdoor music stages, and smaller street venues, all of which are styled accordingly to the district they are in. Some of these street venues exist solely for music, whilst others exist solely for the immersive theatre experience. One of our Paradise Heights venues, Villa Avarice, was an immersive venue in which core parts the narrative took place during the daytime, but for the evening it turned into a music venue.’

‘Citizen’ Frank Foster-Prior, who was on his third trip to Boomtown in 2019, wandered through Paradise Heights and describes it thus:

‘Paradise Heights is full of big fancy high-rise hotels and retail outlets… the interaction here is all about becoming an evil capitalist, and ultimately a VIP member of Paradise Heights.’

It even had a weekend-long No Tomorrow conference, in which characters had a ten-minute slot to give an anti-climate change TED talk – as Ciaran put it, ‘basically spouting bizarrely awful and backwards ideas about how to save the world’. Ciaran’s character this year was an evil fracking entrepreneur called Arthur Coalandoyle: ‘Essentially, I was recruiting audience members as think-tanks to help expand my fracking industry throughout Boomtown. I’d push their ideas right up to the limits of the absurd pastiche of consumer capitalism that Paradise Heights was all about, and then pay them accordingly, stating that I now “own you AND your idea”.’

Boomtown Fair: Oldtown. Photo Daisy Brassington

One of Frank’s favourite areas of Boomtown is the Bohemian Oldtown, with its dark alleys and colourful cast of Carny characters where ‘If you’re not careful you could get a bucket of water emptied over you from an upper window.’

Boomtown’s narrative director, Doug Francisco of The Invisible Circus, explains Oldtown’s key role in the development of the immersive theatre elements of the festival:

‘For Boomtown Chapter 1, The Invisible Circus hosted Oldtown, the city’s first immersive district, where the audience member could jump in and become part of the play – haggling with fishwives, pirates and brigands for clues and ways into hidden rooms, or more intimate theatrical experiences. That element has basically expanded wildly with the scale of the festival and more recently we have made this a city-wide quest where by all the smaller interactions – games, treasure hunts etc – tie into and circulate around the main narrative arc or theme of each year, which is revealed on the main stages as it develops with shows each night, culminating in a climatic cliff-hanger moment on the final night that leads into the next chapter.’

Another area of the festival is Town Centre, where you can find the fictitious city’s centres of government, education and employment. Frank again:

‘There’s a police station, a university, and a job centre with realistic queues, rude clerks and officious security guards. Last year, I went into the job centre and got assigned a job as a musician – I got given a toy flute and told to go out and busk, and had to earn some money to become a “professional” – which I did. This year, I went to the university (the Ivory Towers Academy) and studied art – drew some trees, to represent something that would save the world. I got some points, but “failed”, probably for too much blagging – my friend Emma got pulled off to a separate area and given loads of points and told she was a high achiever!’

Boomtown Fair: Metropolis

Another of the districts (new in 2018 and developed for 2019) is Metropolis – musically, the home of House and Techno, in sharp contrast to Oldtown’s Balkan Beats and Folk Punk. Frank gives us his impressions:

‘Metropolis is a fancy, shiny city district dedicated to hedonism, the future and new technologies. There’s a Digital Funfair and a disco called Pleasuredome. One of its venues is called Little Pharma, where you can have your brain ‘recalibrated’. You can get attached to machines and be ‘assimilated’. I also went to somewhere that sold alternatives to soil – there was a brand called Zoil, which is supposedly a million times better than soil. I had a job interview to become an executive marketing director, or whatever, but I got kicked out for not looking the CEO in the eye – but Emma got the job! Then there was another area (outside Metropolis) that was all about soil testing, to see if it was safe – actual soil, not Zoil – we were given some edible soil samples…’

The level of interactivity – and the framing of Boomtown Fair as a fictitious city – is indeed unique in the festival world. But there are antecedents. The most obvious example is the theatre, circus and cabaret fields of Glastonbury – where many of the Boomtown creative team cut their teeth, and in some cases still continue to work. One of my favourite Glastonbury areas was Joe Rush and the Mutoid Waste Company’s Trash City, which spawned Arcadia (the later becoming a separate area in 2010). This was built around an enormous and wonder-inducing mechanical structure called the Arcadia Spectacular – a mighty metal monster that spun and pumped out light and sound, animated by live circus performance. At the creative heart of the performance element of Arcadia was Bristol’s Invisible Circus. The company’s artistic director, Doug Francisco, was also a mainstay of another favourite Glastonbury area – Lost Vagueness. This full-on, immersive, and theatrical venture was the size of a small village, and featured the Chapel of Love and Loathe (where guests could get involved in a whole cabaret of rituals, from marriage to divorce, bingo to boxing); the gourmet Silver Service Restaurant – an oasis in the midst of muddy fields; the Ballroom, featuring Come Dancing parodies and ska/punk/gypsy jazz bands – not to mention the casino, roller-disco, launderette, trailer park and sculpture garden. With burlesque and camp Carny elements a-plenty, Lost Vagueness even had an in-house ten-strong Can-Can team, Can-Booty-Can, choreographed by circus star KT Sarabia.

Showman Doug Francisco, Boomtown’s Narrative Director. Photo  Andre Pattenden

So it is hardly a surprise to learn that Doug has been involved from the very start of Boomtown – and is now narrative director of the event. It is obvious from his work with The Invisible Circus and Boomtown that he has a fascination with the imagery and iconography of traditional circus and fairground, particularly in the ye old worlde travelling circus aesthetic of the Oldtown district, but prevalent throughout the festival.

‘There is such a magic and mystery in circus history – the roving heroes and clowns, daredevils and divas bringing tall tales and curiosities (true or false no matter) from distant lands; its place outside mainstream society, its travelling nature, often rebellious and revolutionary in its way, and also an equality ahead of its time. So it is indeed a rich and ancient tapestry to draw inspiration from, having held everything within its temporary walls at one stage or another. It also has a strong connection to the common people (so to speak) – it always was, and still is, accessible. But you have to respect its tradition as much as be fearless to take it into new dimensions: we were always a bit too contemporary for the traditionalists, and a bit too traditional for the contemporaries, which I loved and still do.’

In Boomtown Fair, there is an outlet to take circus, street theatre, and immersive performance into those fearless new dimensions – away from the restrictions of the regular performance circuits. Here is an audience of people who might never (throughout the rest of the year) go to a show staged in a theatre or circus tent, but are more than happy to be actively engaged in it all within the festival setting. As Boomtown has developed over the years (it is now a well-established fixture on the summer festival circuit), the audience has come with it. Many people return year after year, and some take the donning of costumes – or indeed of fully developed characters – very seriously, and throw themselves fully into the interactive theatre elements. 

Ciaran says: ‘The audiences at Boomtown are the most generous and giving audiences that you’ll find anywhere in the world. Whilst their openness allowed me to test and try new ideas and methods, it also challenged my reflexes. As they’re so into the narratives, games and tasks that are hidden throughout the city, it’s immensely hard to decipher whether some of them are fellow performers or not; the characters that some of the punters come as makes it seem like they’ve been rehearsing all year round (and maybe some of them have!).’

Boomtown Fair – performance everywhere!

The carnivalesque blurring of roles is something that is at the heart of Boomtown Fair: who is performer, who is guest? Both merge into a total environment, jointly creating a shared fantasy.

This shared fantasy, of course, takes a lot of work to develop. Doug explains what his role as the festival’s narrative director entails:

‘A lot of writing of the kind of top-line titles, threads and briefs that feed into all the other departments and venues; and coming up with the over-arching arc, which I then confirm and develop a bit further with my co-theatrical director Martin Coat from The Dank Parish. We then work with the Boomtown creative producer Mair Morel and co-producers Michelle England and Sophie Shaw to further devise, disseminate and deliver this across the entire festival. So its a collaborative process, but we all have our defined roles and responsibilities.’

And from Ciaran’s perspective as a performer:

‘Within our district, Paradise Heights, we had five venues and each venue had its own director and actors. Each venue team would devise their content, characters and narrative as a team, with direction from an overall district director, to make sure all the venues are connected by a district philosophy. This philosophy is an outlook on the world that all the characters have and the district embodies. The devising process began with discussions around the district’s philosophy and attitude, so that all the venues were united in this. Once this was solidified we started working on immersive tracks and interactions that tied into the festival’s overall narrative and explored the district philosophy. Rehearsals were short and sweet, and focused on developing the key elements. But because the performances are interactive, they are based on what the audience bring to us, so we discovered a lot of the material as we performed it. This meant that we were given a lot of trust as performers to self-direct and devise on-the-go once we were out in the depths of the festival.’

From Frank’s perspective as an audience member:

‘I love exploring all the districts, interacting with the actors in-character, seeing a band of strolling musicians or circus artists go by, and picking up on stories from wandering around and stumbling across things. One of my best experiences was in 2017, my first time, just scouring Boomtown for hours and hours on a Saturday night. You’d go into a side alley, and there’d be your grandma’s house, but there’d be a bunch of people in there having a rave. And sometimes you’d discover something that maybe only five people got to see.’

Boomtown Fair Chapter 11, August 2019: Performers? Citizens? Boundaries blurred

Frank has been to Boomtown three consecutive years now – on the first two occasions as a regular punter, and in August 2019 on behalf of Total Theatre, to check out the immersive elements of the festival, and to test-drive the new Access AMI app http://accessami.com/ developed to give another dimension to the interactive theatrical elements of the festival, and to turn the experience into something more like a live interactive video game. There have been apps for previous editions of the festival, but AMI (the acronym stands for Artificial Machine Intelligence) is a step up. The growing connection and interaction between digital Alternate Reality Gaming (ARG) and live action  is something that Boomtown is pioneering.

Citizen Frank explains further, from his perspective:

‘At the end of the 2018 festival’s closing show, there was a big story about hackers getting into the system and taking down the government of the city, and now AMI is the answer – she’s been brought in to fix everything. Although we don’t know the exact specifics of who is up to what…’

As the Boomtown website puts it: ‘The mighty Bang Hai Corporation was toppled in the end by its own Machine that could not be stopped! Now omnipresent in all systems, AMI is everywhere. Though life seems to be going on as normal, strange new ecosystems are erupting from the Relic that was formerly the Bang Hai Towers corporate epicentre… Who will save us? No one but ourselves! The time is now to become a player in the game of survival and the most urgent and epic chapter in history. We must become the change we seek!’

Frank picks up on how it all works:

‘You download the Access AMI app, and there’s a map of Boomtown and all the different locations, the districts – like Copper County or Oldtown. They each have an icon, and you click on it, and there’ll be something, a snippet of news, a hint of what’s going on, and you go to the area – say, for example, it’s Copper County, where there was a storyline about an explosion. You had to ask around to find out what had happened – the actors are all in character, in period costume, and you have to try to get the information out of them. So we saw a broken window, some broken machinery… and there’s a QR code in the broken window, which you scan to get your point and move you along in the game. So every district you go to, there are these interactive performance elements, linked to an evolving story… ‘

And the AMI app is not the only digital support for the story – clues, riddles, characters and storylines also play out on other platforms, such as Instagram, Twitter, and Facebook; and via websites, podcasts, and VR. So there are multiple sources of narrative within Boomtown, virtual and otherwise, as Frank explains:

‘There’s a newspaper, an actual physical newspaper, which is “in ‘character” talking about the districts and the storyline. You can piece together bits of information from the newspaper, from shows and interactions in districts and venues, and from AMI and other sources, to work out what’s happening. I feel I lost track after  a while… But some people are really on the ball and follow everything.’

And this is the point, and what is marvellous about it all – you can ignore the app and just wander about; you can dip in and out of the app; or you can follow the game fastidiously, amassing points till completion. A quick glance at any social media outlet will bring up thousands of posts about AMI and Boomtown, with people picking up clues and sharing their progress.

Frank, though, has some reservations:

‘Because the app is highlighted as being so important to the narrative this year, and is telling you to go find things – you have to get five scan codes, say – it all becomes more task-driven.’ He also feels that the prominence of the new app has shifted how people behave in the venues: ‘There’s this cult of the snake god storyline – I went into the venue where there was a ceremony for the snake god, and instead of staying part of the ritual, people were chatting about finding codes…’

The ever-present AMI: who’s controlling whom? Photo  Andre Pattenden

Interestingly, the fact that Frank is a dedicated video gamer makes him less inclined, rather than more inclined, to appreciate AMI:

‘I love gaming, but I never really liked the whole hunting Pokemon thing. I can see that a lot of people really enjoy integrating real life and gaming, but for me I game because I want an escape from the world; to get as far as possible from it. But that’s just me! I can imagine the performers might want a bigger audience for their piece – and there were a lot more people at all the immersive venues in the districts this year – but for those of us who get that unique, unexpected experience, it is amazing. It’s a bit like in Punchdrunk shows when you’re alone down in the basement and get a unique one-on-one encounter. I don’t think you need to force or over-encourage people to discover the interactive elements.’

That small quibble aside, Frank does feel that Boomtown is the best festival experience out there:

‘Boomtown is like a real place – a town rather than a festival – it has its own life. You feel that you are inside a fantasy – like being in the Truman show! You never know what you’ll discover. That’s the side of things I love….’

Doug (who as well as being artistic director of Invisible Circus and narrative director of Boomtown is also the instigator of the Extinction Rebellion-linked Red Rebel Brigade) reminds us that although it is all a fantasy, and fabulous fun, there is an activist intention: ‘Our aim is always to mirror the real world and question the status quo; the commercial domination and environmental consequences – so using theatre to hold that mirror up to the world’.

For Ciaran, the best thing about being a performer at Boomtown is how playful and generous the audiences are: ‘They will rock up with their own fully-formed characters and will do absolutely anything to get through the narrative, which is such a treat as an immersive actor because you can just react to what they bring you, and every audience member creates a completely new and fresh interaction.’

And really, you can’t ask for anything better than that! A truly ‘total’ theatre experience.

Featured image (top): Boomtown 2019. Photo Rosa Malcolm.

For more on Boomtown Fair, see www.boomtownfair.co.uk

Boomtown Fair Chapter 12: New Beginnings will take place 12–16 August 2020. Tickets are now on sale.

Boomtown have received funding from Arts Council England to further the development of artists and the immersive elements of the festival.

Boomtown’s Town Centre ‘university’, The Ivory Towers Academy, was created by Bath Spa University students, as part of a scheme developing partnerships between Boomtown and several different universities.

Frank Foster-Prior and his friend Emma attended Boomtown Fair: Chapter 11, A Radical City, 7–11 August 2019, as guests of the festival.

Ciaran Hammond is an actor, director and writer – and a regular contributor to Total Theatre Magazine. He has performed at numerous editions of Boomtown Fair.

Doug Francisco is narrative director of Boomtown and creative director of The Invisible Circus.  www.dougfrancisco.com 

For more on the Red Rebel Brigade www.redrebelbrigade.com

The Invisible Circus are celebrating 20 years of ‘site-specific wonders and acts of creative revolution’. https://invisiblecircus.co.uk/

As more and more artists turn to virtual reality as a medium, Dorothy Max Prior reflects on what works well and why

VR – Virtual Reality – has been with us for quite a while. Some would argue that to trace its origins we need to go right back through the annals of time to early human societies – anthropologists noting initiation ceremonies that involve altering sensory perception and augmenting reality to simulate dangerous situations, in order to put adolescents through a harrowing (but ultimately safe) coming-of-age test. And we could also say that all theatre – even if it is resolutely ‘non immersive’ – invites us into a virtual reality environment: we are invited to suspend disbelief  and enter an alternative world, to believe we are somewhere other than sitting in a seat in a theatre.

This has always been the case, but is particularly so since Antonin Artaud advocated a ‘theatre of the senses’, a ‘total theatre’ that swallows us up, so that there is nothing other than the world we have been brought into. And we all know just how popular immersive and interactive  theatre has been in recent years, thrusting audiences into a kind of virtual reality environment.

But for the purposes of this article, let’s stick to what most people think of when we say ‘VR’ – the donning of a mask or headset that offers us a sensory experience of some sort of lifelike or fantastical world that our mind is tricked into feeling that we are part of in a mock-3D fashion.

Morton Heilig’s Telesphere Mask

So on that criteria, the beginnings were probably in the 1950s, with the arrival of Morton Heilig’s Telesphere Mask, which was described as ‘a telescopic television apparatus for individual use…  Heilig went on to develop the Sensorama – which took things even further by incorporating not only sights and sounds but also smells! ‘The spectator is given a complete sensation of reality, i.e. moving three dimensional images which may be in colour, with 100% peripheral vision, binaural sound, scents and air breezes.’ (Holly Brockwell, ‘Forgotten Genius: the man who made a working VR machine in 1957’). In 1968, Ivan Sutherland built on Heilig’s work and created a cumbersome headset suspended from the ceiling that got dubbed The Sword of Damocles, in honour of its unwieldiness.

But although Heilig’s experiments had been linked to an interest in ‘experience theatre’ (thus pre-empting not only VR but also immersive/interactive theatre), the development of VR through the late twentieth century become associated almost exclusively with applied science, the developing technologies (now strongly linked to parallel development in computer science) put to use for medical purposes, flight simulation, car design, and military training. NASA became lead game players. In 1977 the artist David Em joined NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory, where he held the newly created position of Artist in Residence for seven years. He is considered to be the first fine artist to work in virtual reality, creating a computer-generated navigable landscape titled Aku (1977). Other notable NASA Artists in Residence include Laurie Anderson – more on her later!

There were, though, other parallel developments. Jaron Lanier, founder of VPL Research developed the DataGlove, the EyePhone (yep, pre-Mac!), and the AudioSphere. VPL licensed the DataGlove technology to Mattel, which used it to make the Power Glove, an early VR device that the public could get their mitts on.

The research continued, with the development of real-time graphics, texture mapping, and – as we entered the new millennium – the first affordable VR headsets came on the market, with Sega VR-1 and Nintendo Virtual Boy both pushing forward VR’s development as an entertainment tool. As the new century unfolded, we saw Google (who had by then developed Street View) get in on the game with its (rather odd, I always felt) Cardboard viewer;  then came Sony’s Project Morpheus, a virtual reality headset for the PlayStation 4 video game console. The launch of the Oculus Quest VR headset was a game-changer (literally) – here was a quality set at an affordable price that could be used by gamers and artists alike. And so, in recent years, we’ve seen a plethora of artists using VR.

Marina Abramović: Rising

A few names from contemporary practice to bandy about: first up, there’s Jon Rafman (from Montreal, Quebec), who, having worked with applications such as Google Street View and Second Life, described the progression to VR as ‘the next logical step’. His View of Pariser Platz (co-directed by Jon Rafman and Samuel Walker) appeared at the Berlin Biennial 2016, amongst many other places.

Founded in 2017, Acute Art has worked on projects with high-profile artists including Anish Kapoor, Marina Abramović and Olafur Eliasson. We can differentiate here between artists like Rafman, who are trained (or train themselves) in how to use programming software to create the simulations themselves; and artists like Kapoor and Abramović, who work with VR specialists and key organisations (like Acute Art) to create the work – Kapoor’s Into Yourself, Fall and Abramović’s Rising were both enabled by Acute Art. Gabrielle Schwarz, writing for Apollo Magazine (January 2019) describes Abramović’s Rising: ‘An avatar of the artist is suspended in a rapidly filling water tank, her hands pressed against the glass wall. When the viewer lifts their own hands to meet Abramović’s, the wall comes crashing down and they are transported to an Arctic seascape, surrounded by melting polar caps. The viewer is then invited to pledge their support for the environment, and the Abramović avatar is rescued from drowning.’

Circa69: The Cube

A UK artist whose work falls into the Rafman territory (that is, merging vision and technological know-how) is Simon Wilkinson. Simon describes himself as a ‘transmedia artist’. His work incorporates audiovisual, installation, virtual reality, electronic music, and online and performance media – often combining all of these forms simultaneously. His breakthrough VR work, created with Silvia Mercuriali (of Rotozaza) under the name Il Pixel Rosso, was And The Birds Fell From the Sky, a mad virtual car ride that the company describe thus: ‘An immersive video goggle performance for two people, combining cinema and instruction-based theatre to cast the audience as main character in a wild journey to the world of the Faruk Clown.’ It thus combines Silvia’s interest in what Rotozaza dubbed ‘autoteatro’ and Simon’s developing interest in VR. It is described by Andy Roberts in his Total Theatre review  as ‘an immersive video goggle experience with a rich mix of sound, scents and film – an emotive journey where you’re placed at the centre of the narrative as its lead character.’ (Seen at the Edinburgh Fringe 2011, although the work premiered the previous year as a White Night commission in Brighton). In their next show, The Great Spavaldos, the company also place the audience member in the centre of the action – this time as a high-flying trapeze artist! Reporting in a Total Theatre review, Hannah Sullivan writes: ‘Wandering in space, guided by a hand and completely immersed into a video reality, it is difficult to overcome a sense of danger and allow yourself to let go. But the video plays through a series of encounters in the corridor, and the time this takes allows you to process the idea of moving through the virtual world and being dependent on these anonymous guiding hands.’ then later: ‘It is exciting. I hold onto the rope for dear life. In my eyes are bright lights and my brother up ahead. I watch him swing. I take my own ropes and sit back on the trapeze. The floor is taken from my feet and I swing out into the air. It is a blissful moment and after being so terrified I am ecstatically happy.’ I saw the piece when it was presented (fittingly) at CircusFest 2012 and also found it to be a delightful experience.

In 2014, Simon started to make work under the name Circa69, with the first outing a show called The New Commandments, a collaboration with experimental theatre maker Liyuwerk Sheway Mulugeta in which the audience is invited to become a member of a focus group – their task to re-think, re-brand and re-launch the Ten Commandments for the 21st century. This was a live and multimedia show, rather than a VR show – as was its follow up Beyond the Bright Black Edge of Nowhere. But then came The Cube, in which Simon returned to VR work, using an Oculus headset to immerse the one-person audience into a Dali-esque environment. The next project, Whilst The Rest Were Sleeping, is a virtual reality performance with live music for 16 audience members at a time. Simon is based in the UK, but he takes his work around the world.

Me and the Machine: When We Meet Again

Other early players with VR were Sam Pearson (UK) and Clara Garcia Fraile (Spain), known collectively as Me and the Machine. When We Meet Again (introduced as friends) is described as ‘a wearable film and one-to-one performance’. The company were supported artists at The Basement in Brighton, and the work was developed there and presented as a work-in-progress in 2009. I saw the piece in Brighton Festival 2010 – it also went to the National Review of Live Art and the Forest Fringe in Edinburgh in that year, and subsequently toured extensively across the world. It reframes the audience member as the first person narrator of a rather melancholic nouvelle vague inspired love story. Donning the headset, you take on another body; become someone else entirely. The couple have since stopped working together, but Me and the Machine, under Clara’s direction, continues to make VR, multimedia and experimental theatre work exploring the relationship between the physical body and technology.

A major player on the world stage is Laurie Anderson, who for decades has been at the forefront of transmedia (to steal a word) artistic exploration. Musician, visual artist, composer, poet, photographer, filmmaker, electronics whiz, vocalist, and multi-instrumentalist. Pop star – O Superman reached the number 2 slot in the UK hit parade in 1980. NASA artist-in-residence in 2002 which inspired world-touring show called The End of the Moon. (She’d previously scored the Robert Lepage show Far Side of the Moon, so moon-themed work is an Anderson trope.)

As the moon is such a constant in her work, it is hardly surprising that her most recent (2019) work is called To the Moon. It is a virtual reality piece, created in collaboration with Hsin-Chien Huang, to mark the 50th anniversary of the moon landing. It follows on from 2017’s Chalkroom (also a VR piece made by the same two artists) in which the reader flies through an enormous virtual structure made of words, drawings and stories.

Laurie Anderson & Hsin-Chien Huang: To the Moon

To the Moon continues the exploration – although in this case, in a simpler and more linear fashion. Whereas in Chalkroom there are very many choices to make of ‘rooms’ to enter and spaces to travel through, To the Moon gives the ‘player’ a more limited number of choices – although there is still plenty to do: you can fly fast or slow, linger around structures, delve into craters, or soar high up into space. But comparing notes with my companion afterwards, we realise that we both encountered the same things in the same order: strange see-through skeletal beasts made of letters, buildings made of numbers, a journey up a precipice to sit on a chair to look out at planet earth, abandoned American flags and moon-buggies on the moon’s surface, a spaceman floating eternally in space (evoking 2001 A Space Odyssey), and – most marvellously – a journey on the back of a donkey-like creature. In Chalkroom, there are multiple narratives, and if you experience the work more than once (as I did) or talk to others who have experienced it, you realise that here are a large number of possible narratives to experience. In this sense, Chalkroom is closer to the world of video gaming than the newer piece (and indeed the controls are more complex in Chalkroom). But although simpler in structure, To the Moon is a beautifully conceived, designed and realised VR piece. Not least, having Laurie Anderson’s gorgeous voice and composition skills make for a wonderfully full and satisfying sensory experience: as we fly through this gorgeous alternative moonscape we hear her voice in our ear: ‘You know the reason I love the stars? It’s that we cannot hurt them. We can’t burn them. We can’t melt them or make them overflow. We can’t flood them. Or blow them up or turn them out. But we are reaching for them. We are reaching for them.’

Using VR to create fantasy worlds (inside a 3-D blackboard), or trips into re-imagined real places (the moon) feels completely in keeping with what we suppose its purpose and function to be. But what of issue-based art, or art created from or with social sciences or medical research? Can VR be employed successfully in these contexts?

Remy Archer’s Zoetrope, presented in London for CircusFest 2018, is a 360-degree film installation ‘exploring the life-changing effect of social circus projects in places of adversity’. Donning a VR headset, the viewer is taken to Fekat Circus School in Addis Adaba, Ethiopia; the Battambang Circus in Cambodia; and the Palestinian Circus School. We are transported from a well-resourced contemporary circus festival at the Roundhouse in hipster Camden to environments in which there are few resources – and in some cases, in which even travelling to and from the school is fraught with danger. I enjoy the piece, but don’t feel completely convinced that VR adds anything much to the experience – I would have been as happy to have sat and watched a documentary film. 

Lindsay Seers: Care(less) at Fabrica, Brighton. Photo Tom Thistlethwaite

Lindsay Seers’ Care(less), seen at Fabrica Gallery in Brighton takes the form of a 15-min VR experience, set within a sculptural environment, and accompanied by photographs, drawings and texts. The artwork and exhibition, funded by Wellcome Trust, is a response to research done by three British universities on care for older people – and it also, crucially, is built around the personal experience of the artist’s elderly mother, whose voice and avatar feature. in the VR film.

It is a worthy project, and it is always difficult to critique work that has a social purpose, and is built on autobiographical experience – but it has to be said that the VR experience central to the piece is of a quality that anyone with any experience of VR art and/or video gaming would have to describe as pretty basic (‘Pure unadulterated Adobe After Effects’ said one commentator.) It is unfortunate that I saw this piece on the same day as To the Moon as the difference in quality is notable. Yes, I’m aware that an artist of Laurie Anderson’s stature has a far higher level of money and resources – but this only brings me to ask: why use VR if you don’t have the knowledge of the form and resources to do a really good job? I’m aware, saying this, that many people going into Fabrica to see this piece will be unfamiliar with VR, and see it as an exciting new experience. But for some his isn’t the case, and I don’t think we can start from that perspective, as VR art is now a well-established form.

There are aspects of the Care(less) VR piece that I love, particularly the integration of still photography (such as family photos, and hyper-real views of a large number of bathrooms in various states of disrepair). I also liked the use of perspective and scale in the piece: we find ourselves staring down at a body on a bathroom floor, or Borrowers-like discover we are under a bath. And the central character (the artist’s mother) talking about her care, and her view of her own ageing body, is wonderful. Reklama: Anglų kalbos dienos stovykla vaikams Vilniuje Kaune Klaipėdoje https://intellectus.lt/dienos-stovykla-vilniuje/ I also appreciate Seers’ intention with using VR, which sends sensory information to the brain, shifting consciousness – thus creating a parallel to the confused perceptions of many elderly people with dementia. The sound design, integrating recorded text and composition, is good. So there is nothing wrong with concept, the writing of the piece, and the raw material assembled – it is just the execution of the VR that is lacking.

So this is the key question, to ask of all the above works: is this a good, well-designed piece of VR and/or does the piece actually need to be VR? In some cases, most definitely yes. In other cases, there seems to be a desire to find innovative ways to present ideas that isn’t matched by the technical knowledge required.

Back to Laurie Anderson. In the programme notes for To the Moon, she has this to say: ‘As someone who has used technology to tell stories for many decades I don’t have any illusions that tech has any great advantages over other media. A good story is a good story. And while the latest technology has a certain sexy lure and commercial appeal, I like to spin on a common technology proverb: if you think technology will solve your problems, you don’t understand technology. And you don’t understand your problems.’

To the Moon, by Laurie Anderson & Hsin-Chien Huang, was seen at Attenborough Centre for the Creative Arts on 4 October 2019. www.attenboroughcentre.com

Lindsay Seers’ Care(less) is presented at Fabrica in Brighton from 5 October to 24 November 2019.  www.fabrica.org.uk