„If you have seen a thousand kisses on screen before you ever kiss someone, how does that constant repetition of witnessing people falling in love and kissing for the first time and falling in love and kissing for the first time, affect you when you first, at the age of 14 or 15 or 16, do that? To what extent is that separate from this enormous library of fictional versions? Can we say, there is a separation, or can we accept, that there is not? I don’t know what that is, but I’m fascinated by that question.”The London based artists’ group “Blast Theory” is renowned internationally for their interactive art works. These are similar to computer games, taking place not only online, but also simultaneously on site, in cities’ public spaces like in London, Melbourne, Manchester or Cologne. “Street players”, chased by their counterparts or in search for a certain person, stay connected – by handheld computer and mobile phone technologies – with online players during the event and cooperate with them, in order to fulfil the game’s task.

For the past three years, “Blast Theory” has been collaborating with the Mixed Reality Lab, University of Nottingham, to create their new forms of performance and interactive art, mixing audiences across the Internet, live performance and digital broadcasting.

“Blast Theory’s” work “Can You See Me Now?” won the Golden Nica for Interactive Arts at the 2003 Prix Ars Electronica. The group has a team of six and is lead by Ju Row Farr, Nick Tandavanitj and Matt Adams.

Sabine Breitsameter:

Matt Adams, during the last years you have been creating a quite a number of interactive works. How would you describe them? What is their essence?

Matt Adams:

I think the continuity between them is about the boundary between real and virtual space, looking at the ways in which we might create other interfaces between the real environment and the virtual environment than via the computer monitor, which is the most well known one.

Sabine Breitsameter:

Your pieces are quite similar to computer games. What made you interested in this genre?

Matt Adams:

I think we decided to work in the field of games for a number of intersecting reasons. Firstly due to the burgeoning amount of games and the nature of the games being played. Gaming has become a very socially significant activity for a lot of young people. It’s as large in their lives as TV or cinema or music even. So, that intrigued us. Gaming itself is inherently interactive, so it provided a form of structure for interaction that was very interesting for us. Gaming is has a very wide appeal, so, we have always been interested in trying to reach a wide audience and engage with young people in particular. We felt we had a structure here, which would draw young people to our work and enable us to talk in a language in which they felt familiar and at ease. And I think in it’s own right games have become fascinating for us as artists. We have really become very intrigued about what goes on, when you play a game. What kinds of subjectivities are at play when you play let’s say “Tomb Raider” and you are Lara Croft? To what extent do you identify with her, or to what extent do you see her separate from you? When you play games, you say, “I got killed”, you don’t say, “she got killed”. There is a number of very fascinating forms of a sort of a codification going on in game play, that we became intrigued to explore.

Sabine Breitsameter:

You are working within the field of games, and you understand yourself as artists. How does your work relate to art?

Matt Adams:

I see it on a number of levels. One has to do with undermining the artist as the central creative role in artistic production, and problematizing this idea that the artist is the central creative role. I have unease about the idea of professional artists and consumers of art and those kinds of polar oppositions that are often set up. Blast Theory have always been very fascinated in trying to bring the voices of our audience into our work, and enable structures that allow that to happen. So, I suppose, in artistic context that’s the case.

The other level really is to say that, because my background is in theatre, I see it much more in a performative context. I see its relationship with the theatrical practise, and experimental theatrical practise, in particular of the last 30 or 40 years. This comes really much back to the idea of games, which is since the 2nd World War this idea of how to find non–narrative structures for performative artworks. It has been an ongoing search and problem. Beckett and Pinter, Artaud and Grotowski, all these practioners have repeatedly returned to trying to attack and undermine or restructure theatrical practise.

In a way in the last 15 or 20 years perhaps, there has been a retrenchment into narrative. Those pathways broke down, and the narrative is now considered the absolute theatrical norm in most instances. I suppose we are in a tangential relationship to that of asking: Do the games, does interaction provide a way of addressing that problem of going beyond narrative to create other forms of telling, other ways of communication? I don’t want to degrade narrative, but mainly to say that we are looking to find other patterns for artwork.

Sabine Breitsameter:

In your works, there is no more opposition between artist and recipient. The role of both is merging. What are the consequences, when actor and spectator are becoming identical?

Matt Adams:

I think there is an analogy there with Reality TV where people who spend ten weeks inside a house with more or less hidden surveillance become used to the cameras, so that they are themselves in many ways, and yet simultaneously they are never unaware of the camera and they are therefore playing for the camera, and the kind of slightly hyper–realized persona emerges, as they would like to be seen.

And this is in some ways no different from a small village in medieval England 500 years ago, but in other ways it’s dramatically different because of the extent in which it invades every aspect of our lives. In Reality TV it’s a 24–hour day process, and I wonder what in a mass media society of the intensity that we have reached, what that does to our nature of our identity. The analogy I would use is: If you have seen a thousand kisses on screen before you ever kiss someone, how does that constant repetition of witnessing people falling in love and kissing for the first time and falling in love and kissing for the first time, affect you when you first at the age of 14 or 15 or 16 do that? To what extent is that separate from this enormous library of fictional versions? Can we say, there is a separation, or can we accept, that there is not? I don’t know what that is, but I’m fascinated by that question.

Sabine Breitsameter:

Critics have argued, that productions like yours cannot avoid transporting an affirmative attitude toward industrial propaganda and capitalistic structures.

Matt Adams:

I go much further; I’d say no art is separate from a capitalistic structure. In a public discourse, as soon as you show in a gallery, as soon as you try making any kind of living from your work, you are engaged in capitalistic structures of setting value, of attempting to price what you do and engage with the market place. And it’s an absolute fallacy for anyone to pretend that art somehow exists in a hallowed sphere.

And the artistic funding itself is entirely implicit within a capitalistic system. The social democracies in Germany or in Great Britain they provide money for artist practise, and they do so with very clear state and capitalist goals of advertising the country internationally, attracting investment, attracting tourism. We kid ourselves if we say that if all of these things were absent, there’ll be funding flowing into artistic practise.

So, what’s important is to try and reflect that compromised position and acknowledge it. That is not to say, that there isn’t a line drawn between commercial practise and artistic practise. It is a difficult discussion that is constantly held within artistic communities and in Blast Theory we constantly negotiate what is acceptable and what is not acceptable, how far we are prepared to go, where the integrity of the work lies and what could not be negotiated over.

Sabine Breitsameter:

So what do you consider the basic difference between your work and industrial computer games?

Matt Adams:

Industry all over the world is working on the same kind of ideas. What they want is a very simple, straightforward and reductive process that will generate revenue fast. We attempt to sit on the margin of this process, to try and be able to ask other questions.

Sabine Breitsameter:

Thank you for the interview, Matt.

Biography

Matt Adams, * 1968, has worked as a professional artist for 13 years making performances, installations, short films and interactive artworks. In 1991 he co-founded Blast Theory – internationally renowned as artists’ groups using interactive media, most recently exploring the convergence of online and mobile technologies in collaboration with the Mixed Reality Lab/University of Nottingham. He has participated in conferences internationally, co-authored papers and been a consultant for a variety of commercial and cultural organisations.

Works (selection)

• 2004: I Like Frank
• 2003: Uncle Roy All Around You
• 2002: TRUCOLD
• 2001: Can You See Me Now? (Golden Nica at the 2003 Prix Ars Electronica)
• 1999: Desert Rain, 10 Backwards
• 1998: Kidnap
• 1996: Something American
• 1994: Invisible Bullets, Stampede