Digital artists Simon Katan and Luke Fraser present Clamour, an interactive mixed media theatre piece for live coder and audience, experienced simultaneously on stage and via a smartphone app in a new frontier for digital theatre.
The setting is Sealand – a lone outpost surrounded by vast swathes of ocean, and survivor of global catastrophe. Now faced with an existential fight for its future, its people must forge the tools they require. New rules must be written, paving the way for a new state of being. With their resourcefulness and through working together what could go wrong?
Through this story and the unfolding of subsequent events, Clamour wryly and reflexively interrogates how tech and social media mediate and influence our knowledge, relationships, and identities. Via their engagement with both the action on screen and via their smartphones, the audience make collective decisions to influence what they are seeing on stage.
Throughout, an inscrutable figure on stage will play a powerful role in shaping divergent audience experiences with heuristic games that charm, frustrate and deceive. Digital projection and sound diffusion will form an integrated counterpoint. Yet it is the audience themselves, through gameplay with image, sound, and text, who will determine the shape of the final performance.
Dr Simon Katan is a digital artist with a background in music and a strong preoccupation with games and play. He completed a PhD researching audio-visual co-dependency in music at Brunel University in 2012 and won a Prix Ars Electronica Honorary Mention for his work ‘Cube with Magic Ribbons’. He lectures in computing and has been head of Creative Computing at Goldsmiths University since 2015.
Luke Fraser is a London-based composer and educator working across a range of media including sound, music, film, movement and text. He is currently a Composer-in-Residence at Visby International Centre for Composers and at Elektronmusik Studion EMS, Stockholm.
Clamour is at Roundhouse on 22nd November 2018.
