Collaborative Unit

Anushka Monteiro
Chen Wang (Shaye)
Ojaswi Kejriwal
Wanrui Ren
Asli ece Ates
Jin Wang
Shivangi Gadhoke
Xindi Zhang (Cindy)
Yiyao Lu
Shanshan Li

We started the week with a LARP presented by Stef and Elgera. At first, I found it rather hard to understand the concept and how it operates, but once we started doing it, we started to get the hang of it; the iterative process struck me, and after each lesson, we would talk about reorganisations or new rules or understandings of the process. We also engaged with the conceptual underpinnings of the LARP in an intuitive way with thoughts on corporations and business models. After being given the brief and our subject of sound, we started to brainstorm ideas, but I felt we were still grappling with the question of what a LARP is and what a dead zone is. When we had our tutorial, we were caught up with questions about the rules and critical of our understanding, which Steph and Elgera dispelled with a more experimental mindset. We then started to ideate more freely, and while brainstorming collaboratively, we decided to try out an idea based on removing the sound of language to see if we could lip-read without it. The language barrier was an issue, and the experiment wasn’t very successful/ didn’t really take us forward. We then brainstormed with the entire group and decided on testing voicing the inner critique or monologue to overwhelm with sound. It was really fun chasing Asli around and describing everything she did. We asked her to complete tasks, but she wasn’t able to. After this, Asli gave feedback on her experience

Reflecting on this, we decided to connect this idea with online marketing and content algorithms. Based on our idea of what influences our inner dialogue and what contributes to the mental ‘noise’ of consumerist culture, we decided to have three different areas of dialogue for the people facilitating the noise (broadcaster) role: content (clickbait articles), adverts, and descriptors (monitoring participants’ actions—i.e. trackers/CCTV).

“In no other form of society in history has there been such a concentration of images, such a density of visual messages. One may remember or forget these messages but briefly one takes them in … Publicity images also belong to the moment … Yet they never speak of the present. Often they refer to the past and always they speak of the future… One could put this another way: the publicity image steals her love of herself as she is, and offers it back to her for the price of the product.” John Berger, ‘Ways of Seeing’, 2008

We wanted to try to instil some of this distance between the person and the life they are living, which John Berger talks about to highlight how online culture can interfere with our perception of ourselves and the world by voicing this visual noise. In our next attempt, we used a studio apartment on the participants’s day off. Activities were, however, fairly mindless, so noise was fairly easy to withstand/block out mentally. Broadcasters ran out of content easily as actions were ambiguous. We then tested it in a new setting: a grocery store. Again, actions were ambiguous due to being pretend, and roles were not very explorative regarding what you could do with them. Again, broadcasters ran out of steam quickly, and participants who were probably very used to being advertised whilst shopping were unaffected. We spoke to Alistair and brainstormed directions, and we decided to make the setting use actual objects so broadcasters knew exactly what participants were doing and building in a silent zone that participants could trigger as a relief from the noise as part of a safety feature.

In our next trial, we set our participants a set of riddles. The group was divided in half and competed against each other. We played notification noises, adverts, and other annoying noises to take the strain off the broadcasters. We also used our own Instagram or emails to help us create content for when the broadcasters lost steam. We advised them of their right to impose a silent zone when the noise was too much; however, they wouldn’t be able to speak for themselves, hindering their collaboration.

The participants didn’t use the silent zone at all despite the noise being very loud, and when asked why, they said they felt challenged to complete the task without it and saw it as conceding defeat to the game. The LARP was immediately run entirely in silent mode as an experiment, and participants said it didn’t make too much difference as they didn’t feel like they needed to communicate much; however, we observed that the rules didn’t instruct them to work collaboratively. If run again, we would have made each team communicate their answer to the group to agree on before putting it forward. However, after reflecting on this, we realised that this LARP was too much like a normal game and had no roles for the participants to embody. After consulting Al and brainstorming as a group, the restaurant's formula was hit upon.

Customer & waiter. Photo credit Cindy Zhang

We trialled this LARP several times, and different combinations of rules/distances/roles were tested amongst the group. We then tested the LARP on Alistair, Tonisha, Elgera, and Steph. The feedback was that the customers didn’t really have much to do, the onboarding and offboarding needed more work, and the swarming of the broadcasters was effective. I created an audio track using the skills shown in the Audition workshop we had, mixing old adverts all overlapping and sometimes distorted into a cacophonous jumble to add to the disorienting noise, but I’m not sure how much it added in the end. (see below for track).

Customers receiving orders. Photo credit Cindy Zhang

Our final LARP went well; feedback was that the world-building with the props was great, the NHS jail was funny, I should have practised delivering the rules a few more times to overcome the nerves, the personal content from the broadcasters was great, and silent zones were a bit too easy—participants weren’t pushed hard enough to disrupt communication. If I could do it again, I would have learnt more of a script for a broadcasting role and used more physicality to block visual communication.