Image - Call/Waiting in public - Photography: Linda Lee
Kia ora tātou, nau mai haere mai… welcome everyone to our latest podcast & blog for Urban Dream Brokerage. Part of an ongoing commitment to sharing the knowledge of our creative whānau, in this case a recorded conversation.
LISTEN TO PODCAST HERE - or feel free to read the transcript below.
Not just because of Covid, artists have looked to working with technology in truly creative ways, the uptake is however noticeable in our post-lockdown world. Considered as another tool in the kit, tech in its myriad of forms continues to enhance & inform the direction of many creatives across the making spectrum.
In March & April 2023 we promoted the work Call/Waiting by OandP Works. A narrative journey through Courtenay Place, told through a series of texts, voice messages & image exchange. Hosted on an app called Pickpath that has been developed by theatre collective Binge Culture.
For Urban Dream Brokerage this presented a unique form of public storytelling, Call/Waiting provided an opportunity for the artists to deeply create narrative with the Pickpath platform. This prompted our conversation with Olivia & Joel of their respective companies about how both view their use of tech within the creative projects they produce. Enjoy…
JM - Okay let's start, so welcome everybody. Kia ora koutou, I'm here with Olivia Mahood and Joel Baxendale who have both joined me here on this chat that we’re having today, skirting around the subject of tech and art, and we'll get into the specifics of that as we go. So, first of all I’d like to welcome Olivia, welcome Olivia.
OM - Thanks.
JM - And to you Joel, kia ora.
JB - Kia ora Jase.
JM - Yeah nice to have you both here, thanks for joining. First of all, I’d like to start with you Olivia, maybe you’d just like to introduce yourself a bit and maybe the company that you work with and for.
OM - Sure, so my name’s Olivia, my company is called O&P Works, which is a collaboration between myself and Poppy Serrano. We’ve been collaborating for quite a few years now. Our tagline is live performance installations, so we make work across a wide variety of genres, but it's all live, it's all quite interactive and mostly focused around public spaces.
JM - Awesome, and what about yourself Joel?
JB - I’m the Creative Director of a little, I guess we call ourselves a “new form theatre company,” called Binge Culture, which I guess actually we’ve got quite a lot in common with O&P Works. We’re really focused on the audience experience and giving them stakes. I guess we have a pretty broad number of forms in which that could take. We’ve worked on regular stage shows through to kind of happenings and increasingly doing more and more stuff in the digital realm, which is a brave new world for sure.
JM - Yeah nice, and Olivia what's been your creative path to this point?
OM - I studied as an actor originally and right at the end of drama school Poppy supported me with a work that I was making called Boss of an Office, which is a one-on-one interactive experience and we've basically been collaborating ever since then. So yeah, the tail-end of drama school discovered, I guess I think of it as non-narrative, live experiences. I mean to be fair Boss of an Office does have a narrative bent to it. Yeah, we’ve just been building works in different genres since then from durational performance art, to public installations. Just experimenting and following what interests us, I haven’t been doing much acting but I’ve been doing a decent amount of producing and creating interactive experiences.
JM - That's really interesting in itself, you know... you go somewhere like drama school, in your case become an actor, and then often you end up not and I don't think that's an uncommon path. Have you have you got anything to say about that there? You know, maybe, you know the ideals that you maybe have taught to you at a tertiary education for creativity and then making that transition out into the real world I suppose.
OM – Yeah, when you're doing something for three years 9 to 5, you truly believe you’re going to continue to do that exact same thing for the rest of your life, and then once you leave that environment, then you have to reckon with what you are actually going to do with your time. I mean I could probably speak for a long time about the acting industry in New Zealand and what is and isn’t possible. But by the same token within drama school we were definitely encouraged to think about what kind of work we wanted to make ourselves, and I’m not a script writer or, I was never called to make that kind of work to put myself into more of a traditional acting context. I was always more interested in, better at, making the kind of work that we have been making.
JM – Yeah nice. And Joel, what about yourself… What's your creative path been? I imagine a fairly varied road to get to this point. But yeah what's your path been?
JB - I mean yeah we started, well how far back do you go? But I guess our training was at Victoria University of Wellington, so we did a theatre course there, everyone who started in Binge Culture. I guess we were kind of drawn together around looking at this theatre company called Forced Entertainment from the UK and it was very different from anything that we had seen or really anything that we'd been taught. So we got the opportunity, I think we were working on Ralph’s honours projects doing a copycat of that, which is basically just de-privileging the narrative and de-privileging character and looking at theatre in terms of its component parts, and looking at things like what is the relationship with the audience at any one point, allowing it to be kind of collage and all this, I guess it's a deconstruction of the theatre experience. I think that that philosophy grounded us throughout everything. Even though we’ve probably made a few, maybe half a dozen stage shows, or along those lines, before we started moving toward some radical departures from traditional theatre, or at least end stage theatre. Yeah, I guess it's that devising methodology that under pinned all the work and that kind of iterative making. All that's happened over time is that where one idea might have formed a 5 to 10-minute section in a stage play, sometimes you know they become whole works in and of themselves. I guess a good example of that would be Whales, which came from being the finale of a show called This Rugged Beauty where audience members came out from the auditorium and helped rescue some stranded whales on stage. And that became more a happening, it became its own thing, its own 45-minute experience or longer, depending on how far the whales had to swim.
JM - Laughs) Of course I remember that well down in Kaikoura which was such a crazy environment considering the weather and everything that was going on that day.
Image - Shared Lines Kaikoura: Binge Culture's Whales Performance - Photography: John Lake
JB - That felt very appropriate for the kaupapa. If not for the audience members (laughs).
JM - That’s great. And listen for both of you then my question is how important is it to you really? And why is it important to be presenting work outside of … in my notes I've got kind of traditional venues and institutions. You know we think of theatre makers very much there being in the theatre, so you have either of you or both of you could comment on how important it is to be presenting outside of that there
JB - I mean I can get very performance studies on this so I just feel like performance happens anyway, and everywhere. And if you can, if you can find a way to frame that then it just opened up so many possibilities, and why would you restrict yourself to a stage space?
OM - Yeah the comment about framing is interesting, cause I think one of the reasons we’ve liked to - I mean we’ve made work for theatre space as well, and in traditional venues, galleries but those spaces do put a frame around a word that can sometimes be, not undeniable but it's there, it’s pre-existing, in the same way wherever you put a work there will be a context and that context will either be supporting the work or fighting against it. And so some works, you want to put them in a traditional space or an institution, maybe because you're trying to shift the public’s experience of that institution or how they feel in that space. But sometimes you don't want to have to be wrestling that contacts in the first instance, you want to be removing barriers to accessing an experience, and public spaces can be a cool way to have fewer barriers for access and also give opportunity for people who wouldn't normally enter traditional venues.
JB - And I think on that point as well, if you set up a situation where people are familiar with the rules of that space, it can give them more access. So some people are really comfortable in a theatre space or in a gallery space and so no problemo. But you know, you can make pretty radical performance, but if its set in a space, in a metaphorical space, the rules know how they're supposed to interact, you can go way further. Like an example might be like a seminar or something, people might be terrified of interacting on a stage, but if they go into something that looks and feels like a seminar they might feel way more comfortable putting their hands up or even reading things out. So just quite a basic example but…
OM - Yeah, no, totally that's really interesting actually, cause with a lot of our work we built within the world of an office, the traditional office. Which, also similar, has rules and ways that you expect to interact and everyone, even people who haven’t worked much in offices kind of understand those environments and that has allowed, I think freedom, for people to play within that cause they’re like “I understand this environment and understand its rules and because I understand them well, I feel comfortable to push against them or ..”
JB – Also I was just gonna say, your most recent work was really, was a great example of that I thought, which the name escaped me sorry Olivia.
OM – Big Time Clocks
Image - Big Time Clocks by O+P Works for BATS Theatre 2021 STAB Commission.
JB – Big Time Clocks, sorry, great name, can’t believe I forgot it. But contrast that with maybe something like Sleep No More which I don't know like…. I've done a lot of research into that show having never experienced it, but I can imagine feeling quite like unsure of what I'm allowed or not allowed to do, whereas going into that, into your show I was like “well, this is this is what it is, I know the rules here.” Whereas if I’m in like castle or something, it's like what am I allowed to touch and not to touch?
JM - That's interesting and that was kind of my follow on question from this and leads into it, is is how do you find audiences interacting in these different spaces? And maybe you’re answering it with some of your previous answers, but yeah audiences, how do you feel they interact at a more traditional venue as opposed to when maybe they’re encountering some of your work in wilder spacers, if I put it that way?
OM - In my experience in public spaces, it’s probably less predictable how. But we've had some really cool, not coincidences, but interactions that you wouldn't get in a theatre space, which I think drives my love for creating work for public spaces. We did a collaboration with Long Side Youth Theatre last year, where we built a series of different performance art, public performance art pieces in collaboration with them. And one of them was called The Buoys, as in fishing buoys, and it was three performers with fishing rods, and at the end of the fishing rod signs, it said fishing for compliments. We had some people interacting with that work and practically you're staring at a man standing in the streets in Lambton Quay interacting with that work in a way that like I've never seen that demographic of person interact with another one of my works in the same way that they did. And we’ve also had just some cool experiences where you can surprise and delight people, because they're not expecting what they're about to see.
JB - I think, I mean to come at it from another angle. We’ve often looked to use the real-world as a way of creating intersections between in the fictional world that the audience is kind of looking at and this vast physical world with sort of endless possibilities. I guess putting people in, I guess the hardest thing to do when you're working in the real world is containing it enough. Because in a theatre you can turn out the lights and you’ve got everyone's full attention sound. But how do you keep people focused outside is a challenge. And there's a few different ways to approach it, one is to allow it to be something at some people stumble across and make of what they will and interact with for as long as they want and you never know what's going to tickle peoples fancy, and what mood they're going to be in when they are in that space. And then the other way that when exploring is to create, essentially shows, that are kind of a layer on top of the public space and that, I feel it can be really rewarding, but it's also harder to, cause people are there at a set time or even if that's starting with in their own time, it could be over a certain period and may be interacting with performers. There’s a lot more variables. Well maybe the same amount of variables but the variables are more tricky, people can’t just – you’re trying to still frame an hour long experience or something. But we use digital technology, (it) is a real help for that kind of thing, because it gives you that mainline to people's pockets. So you know wherever they are, you can access them through text or audio and more recently through a more gamified experience, and that can help just tighten the whole experience up a bit. But it's a super interesting question with ome billion different things to say about it.
JM – That’s good and great thoughts from both of you but your last thought there segways nicely to my next question really, which is, where did the interest and journey of tech come into your respective work? and maybe Joel I’ll throw this at you first, seems like from my observations that it's always had a role to play in, from my interactions with Binge Culture that there’s always been a place with it, but certainly now seeing where you're taking this with the development of Pickpath, and so forth. So where did this interest and journeys start and go for you?
JB - I mean it just with the simplest of technologies, which was audio, and the very first work we did outside of traditional theatre, or not traditional theatre, but at least a live show experience, was an unauthorised audio guide of Te Papa. So it's just a linear experience that guides you through space. And we were just really interested in, can we bring the same? I guess? It's a bit of a cheeky kind of satirical kind of view of the world. You know, is there another form for this that that works well with this approach that we have? And mean from there - it just it seems linear now, in hindsight it was just definitely groping in the dark. But it went from audio to, okay now audio, but there’s a bit more user control. So it was hosted in an app and then it was making our own app, our own platform so that we could iterate more easily. Without having to constantly go back to developers and republish and things that. And from there we were like “ Oh now we’ve built this platform maybe other people want to use this platform.” So we managed to wrangle some money out of the Government to develop it into something that anybody could use and that’s sort of where we’re kind of sitting at the moment. Although, even though we're still this developing this technology and we just have a debrief with Olivia and Poppy about their experiences using the platform – already I'm like “What's the next thing?” You know like, looking to this web developer in Singapore and being like “Yeah the web web browser is underutilised!” and these guys in Germany made a system for sending text messages as part of a show experience, I don’t know. The possibilities for where performance can sit is sort of endless and I think with new emerging technologies that we're still in that space where film was, where they just had the trains running at the screen, you know, we haven't really scratched the resurgence of what we can do with these new technologies.
JM – What about O&P, Olivia? What's your interest and journey into including tech in particular, in your work?
Image - Pickpath live - Photography: Linda Lee
OM – We started, the first kind of tech we included in a project was one of the earlier versions of Boss Of An Office. Which is a one-on-one immersive experience, you’re the boss of an office cubicle, a boss of a fictional office. In the very first version there was a computer there, and it was basically a set piece, and it didn't work and then the next version we got to use this cool game by this really cool game designer called Pippin Barr, who's actually from Wellington but he lives in Montreal in Canada, I think I've got that right. And he has a bunch of cool games on this website, on Pippin Barr’s website, they’re all freely available but we used a game of his called “it’s as if you were doing work,” which looks like a 90s computer, and it just gives you little prompts to type emails and that kind of thing. So we used that in the next iteration, and then the iteration after that we wanted to make it. Well actually, the iteration after that was a version we did as an online version of the experience during lockdown and (?) because of that and because it was online we wanted it to be more interactive so two-way rather than one person just playing a game that they could play at any time. So we rolled the technology back and we used Zoom and Google Suite basically, to create interactivity by manually sending participants emails and did screeds of work to create a bunch of content to be able to interact with them on those one-on-one sort of 10 minutes experiences that only 20 people got to experience because it was so labour-intensive. And from that, I think I still love that version of the work, but thinking about how we could use technology in a way that was interactive allowed the audience to pick different paths and create their own journey without us always having to do that huge backend and then, we know Joel. So we we were talking, Poppy was working on one of the works they were building with Pick Path and I went to a showing of that work to get a feel for that in motion and now we are here to clarify.
JM – Just to clarify, not just from myself, but you know anybody that is listening. How would you define gamification? It's a term that I hear quite a bit, don’t know if I fully understand what it means or how to define it.
JB - I don't know if I fully understand what it means, because it think it can mean a lot of things were different context but what I mean when I use it is like is that responsiveness to the audience's choices I guess, and ability to, responsiveness really and then if you think about the different ways that games give you know give you that, it could be is an element of randomness, or it could be that there's is putting you in the driver's seat, different pathways that you can choose to go down or just feedback I think to interactions that you as the audience do. Does that feel like a broad enough?
JM - That’s a really great answer actually, I hadn’t considered it that way at all but it makes a lot of sense. Olivia have you got anything to add to that?
OM - Not really, its not something I’ve thought much about before.
JM – Are either of you, Joel or Olivia, are either of you into gaming, per say?
JB - I'm a casual gamer. I jump on the bandwagon, my friends are into something and my computer can handle it, but I’m also very into board games also just games that you make up yourself. You know brushing your teeth game or whatever, I mean you can find anything, if you’re bored enough.
JM – Olivia are you a gamer?
OM – Unfortunately, I’m very into Stardew Valley but that is a rare occurrence for me to be that into a game
JM – What’s __ valley? I’ve not heard of ____
OM - It’s a farming game
JM - So listen, so this particular tech, I mean you’ve kinda alluded to it a little bit and I’m probably asking this a bit more of Joel, you’ve alluded to a little bit, your journey of getting here. But if we got into the teeth of, so you played with different apps, and then you decided to get to a point where you were going to develop your own, and then you’re able to get some funding, what does that look like? How do you put that together? You’re finding developers I suppose? What’s that whole process?
JB - Well yeah, I mean the first relationship we had was just, a pretty generous developer offered to make us an app for free, but it was still the logistical - not for free sorry, it was cheap. Probably felt like it was free to them, for us it felt like (inaudible) But you’ve still got that logistical back-and-forth, that's probably fine if you’re fully designing a system, and (?) go make it one iteration or whatever and then we're done. But when we got frustrated with that process that I was just asking around, and someone put me in touch with a chap called Ian Shepherd who’s based down in Christchurch who's a real game developer’s game developer, he used to run the association down in Ōtautahi. Yeah, he was just really happy to help us build the system that we needed to do our thing. He sort of was really just interested in what we were trying to do. Really first of all, it came out of that desire to be able to design that content, update the content without having to call them. And the irony of that is that now that we've got some funding to develop, I'm on zooms with him every week for at least an hour, cause now we’re trying to update the UX and the UI and the features and things, but I mean the app itself pretty simple - the amazing thing is the ability to edit without having to talk to him. So, Olivia and Poppy didn’t have to a single zoom with Ian, they just had one onboarding session with us.
JM - So, when you talk about that with him, is building and that kind of done with coding and such? He's able to set it up in a way that then you're able to just work with an editor from there, is that the right concept I’m thinking of here?
JB - Yeah exactly right. I mean it probably the most familiar thing people will be able to – or adjacent parallel experience is the Squarespace-type model for websites. Just drag and drop tools and once you've got your head around that, how the tools work, you can configure them in any kind of combination you want. So at the moment, we've got him to - imagine like every page of the app is a little node and then you can edit the node so that it displays different kinds of content, different kind of media, and then it has a different way of getting to the next node, whether it's multichoice, or you put it an input in, type something in or, just press continue. I mean at the guts of it, that’s what it does and then there's lots of other little features that you can do like, recall things, and little kind of ways to flavour that basic concept.
JM - Yeah interesting, and then Olivia for you, obviously you've got your own kind of path, I suppose, to this particular piece of tech, Pick Path, that's kind of got you to (inaudible). Do you just want to chat maybe a bit from that point of view?
OM - Yeah, what to say on that? I mean, we were quite interested in if we stripped out all of the manual stuff we were having to do when we use technology in our other works. We were interested in how we could expand the performance time, so if you had something, that was an app that an audience member could potentially interact with at anytime when they were in a specific space, you could expand the performance time so the audience could access that on their own schedule or on their own terms. I think – I mean the app can be used alongside performance, and Binge Culture have done some of that. And then, what we've been experimenting with, is the app and the participants who are participating' at the time are the performance, because we're quite interested in that. We’ve discovered that that's what we’re interested in about the app by working with app I guess, so I don’t know if there’s been such a linear path to that.
JM - Cool! That’s cool though, a nice journey in itself. Do either of you, I’m kind of getting to the last couple questions here. I guess one that I wanna ask, do either of you, for the sake of anybody listening, is there any kind of tech-based work around, and I'm just going to say the Arts here, that you'd love to hold up as an example, of beyond your own work, that may interest the audience or you think that is is working in a really interesting way or something. Yeah, have either of you got any examples? Both of you?
JB - Yeah, on a large scale it feels like people haven't quite tracked(?) the intersection between a live experience and a digital experience. People are still stuck in one or the other, even to the point where is like ‘if I want to do a show online, I'm going to be doing a live show and doing it somehow through zoom.’ Something like that where it’s essentially just a different platform for doing what you were doing before. I think there are few companies, a lot of overseas companies, I think that are working in this space, Rimini Protokoll have been doing stuff like this for a long time. I'm talking to these guys Machina X, so they're Berlin-based I think. You know similarly, they’re less interested in how tech can facilitate a traditional experience or a more classic experience and try and get to a wider audience, they’re just really exploring the possibilities of what are the performance possibilities that tech allow I guess. There’s probably a ton of examples, there's definitely a few people doing stuff that’s audio based primarily, but you know it might be delivered through an app or something and navigate to around spaces, like one step a time like an this which is Australian company. I mean, I think a lot of people have (inaudible) definitely smaller players. Can you think of any big examples Olivia?
OM - We had a play around with the app Karen by Blast Theory. I don't know whether you've looked at that one at all?
JB - Yeah that’s a good example, cause they call you, it's like a therapist in an app.
OM - It is like a therapist yeah. To my taste it’s not as interactive as I would like it to be. It’s interactive but you’re still kind of on the railroad tracks in a way where I think there is a lot of tech, there is always going to be some kind of track that the audience member is on even if there multiple diverging tracks.
JB – But yeah that’s a good example of, I guess it's quite old that app really.
OM - It is yeah.
JB - But it’s definitely a touchstone for us as well. It's cool. It's cool seeing people like Complicity playing with binaural audio with that show The Encounter. Which was felt like, even though it was quite a simple gesture, it was a true, your truly hybrid work in terms of its stage show, but it's also much of the work consists in headphones that the audience are all wearing at the same time. But yeah the people who probably making really interesting games, which are crossing over, coming at it from that direction, crossing over into the performance world. I’m much less knowledgeable about them, but I know that that’s something that game makers are interested in as well. So it's sort of like there's a meeting in the middle starting to happen.
JM - Oh I get fascinated by those sorts of, one of the things going back to the crypto company I was actually talking about they, I find it very interesting following their platform. They basically pay artists to come and feature in their games. You know generally that's musicians, but it also is extended out to visual artists and stuff as well and really that ends up becoming exclusive content, NFT style within it. And so sorry just to pick up on what you're saying they're Joel, its one of the aspects of gaming on one of its outer reaches that really interests me. How are they, from that other end like you say, how are they co-opting the arts in what they do? Even two examples that I've read about around where you know those games where big communities, the World of Warcraft and stuff like that, where online meetings will happen and I know things like weddings have happen for example. But people have chosen to put shows on and whatever that might look like. A performance inside of Minecraft be organised, so yeah, can't look at it from those different angles is really interesting. So my last question I ask you both to finish up here really is; where do you want to see all of us moving. What are your thoughts for this future? Both for yourself? But also, you know for the arts and maybe a bit more around theatre which is where you two (inaudible).Where do you see all this going?
JB - Metaverse, no I don’t know, whatever the opposite of that is. Olivia what are you reckon?
OM - I’m not sure, I know there’s metaverse stuff happening. I don’t fully understand that metaverse stuff..Yeah, I don't know
JM - Do you both, I mean obviously Joel you’re invested something like Pick Path and so I see that you will be continuing this in the future. What about yourselves, as well Olivia, you and Poppy, do you see yourself continuing to interact with tech-based making in the future?
OM - Yeah think so, I think it’s just about, for us it's always discovering Pick Path and discovering Pippin Barr earlier on. They feel like, not coincidences, but happy opportunities that then inspire work to happen because of the discovery of that thing, rather than feeling like we have a specific thing that we always trying to make. Yeah it feels like a meeting point of (inaudible) that we’re interested in working with, or tech that we discover, and (inaudible) inspiration springs from (inaudible) what we could make.
JB - Yeah it’s that kind of utilising, you see a technology being utilised in one way, and you see another way it could be manipulated. And then it’s just a, exploration of, I mean you can do that with the most basic technology. We did show with text messaging. You know, just liking manually text messaging 40 people at a time, and then without realising that will get us blocked off the network. I think when you’re working in this space you do see those opportunists all the time. Your trained, your brain is trained to seek out the theatrical in any opportunity. So technology is just no different than cool found space or a particular performer or performance style.
JM - So I guess to finish off, have either of you got any thoughts of wisdom that you might share with anybody listening that might be motivated to try this sort of stuff out? Or think about taking their own creative practice into these directions?
JB - I mean I’d just start off with, use what you know for a start and really get to the edges of what you can use, the existing technology that you able to already use and then see what other, like what Poppy was saying, see what other platforms are out there that you can manipulate and twist to your own purposes. But yeah, if you want to get real complex, find a developer or become a developer who's interested in what you’re doing.
JM - What about you Olivia, you got any words of wisdom?
OM - It's probably similar, we definitely have made some cool things using existing technology that people are already familiar with and has a low, we quite like working lo-fi cause it means that we can make it ourselves, and we don't have to have knowledge and experience that we don't already have so yeah, I feel like it's like ‘don't be held back by what you don't have access to or the knowledge that you don't have, just work with what you do and then, go from there.
Ngā mihi nui ki a korua, thank you to Olivia Mahood & Joel Baxendale for sharing their thoughts & knowledge… and to anyone giving time to listening or reading. Please feel free to comment & share… also take some time to look through our various blog & podcast content, plenty of creative wisdom for all.
Until next time… noho ora mai