ZU-UK will present Project Perfect Stranger and PlagueRound, a five-day WhatsApp experience followed by a live, interactive post-normal gameshow.
Project Perfect Stranger is a series of playful provocations and collaborative tasks with an anonymous partner over five days from a set of instructions sent via WhatsApp each morning. You and your partner will then select a 15-20min each day to connect.
The project is an investment into a connection to another human being who knows nothing about you, and who has no judgements, no prior knowledge, no historical or emotional baggage with you, and vice-versa. Your collaborative relationship will be whatever you both decide it should be. You will be required to commit to the daily tasks with your partner over the five days. Your identity will only be revealed to your partner if/when you and your partner meet each other for the first time on the 20th February.
The PlagueRound Game Show is the culmination of the five days of play between the Project Perfect Stranger participants and can be experienced either as a live participant on Zoom, or as a spectator via YouTube live stream. During the game show, Project Perfect Stranger participants reveal their identities to each other for the first time. A space of interactivity, participation and fresh ways of generating remote connection, the event utilizes game design to spark genuine human connection through the shared, global experience of the Covid-19 pandemic.
PlagueRound is split into several thematic sections where contestants sometimes compete individually or in pairs, and others collaborate in small groups. Cracking open how collective experiences can link us, how we find a sense of ourselves in the post-normal and how we can define what the post-normal looks like. Only if you have participated in Project Perfect Stranger can you apply to be a live participant in the Game Show.
Persis Jadé Maravala, ZU-UK’s Artistic Director said: “There are paradigms and values from old normal that have no place in the world post-covid19. All the old orthodoxies and established ways of thinking are dying. We need to grow up and forget about a ‘new-normal’. The new normal implies an old normal – but the old normal was constantly mutating in such a way that it was unreliable, and the new normal will be equally illusory. Because normal was the problem in the first place.”
Project Perfect Stranger runs 10th – 14th February with registration deadline on 3rd February. PlagueRound Game Show is on Saturday 20 February 2021 at 2pm
For more information, or to sign up please visit https://zu-uk.com/project/project-perfect-stranger-and-plagueround/
