A subjective rationale for LARP and RGP
A live action role-playing game (LARP) is a form of role playing game (rgp) where the participants physically act out their characters' actions. Real Game Play (RGP) *mutation of rgp see above, is a combination of Larp and your own identity/lived experience – think of it like a meta structure of you and the character given to you to act out.
Why re-appropriate Life?
We re-appropriate Life out of fascination. What lies beyond the standard state of perception? commonly based on cognitive emotions and experience is something RGP could tap into.
For example, if you listen to the same track over and over and over for 18 hours straight, like CA Conrad did with Bobby Vinton’s Blue Velvet, you start to notice the hauntology of the active cell, which in this case is the track. CA declared he literally had to pull the socket out of the wall to know the electric was off and the track could no longer be played, he became so attuned to the track - the track became the architecture of his perception of space.
Re-appropriating life allows the human mind to be disrupted and brought into a state of the uncanny enabling it to hack its common nodes of perception and taught identity. For example, the uncanny could be likened to the leach and the blood it feasts on to unconscious excess. We don’t die from the leech sucking our blood, but we do enter another mode of existence, we become a life force for another being. This state is both actively restricting and co-habiting with the leach. We could call this the moment of Meta-living with another being, in the case of Larp, your character.
Could this be a political resistance or re-mapping?
The points, focuses, knots, blockages of the body are always inflamed, but in certain moments in life, they rupture or release in radical serenity.
We are all workers today, because nobody really works in the western world. We play our roles the guru, the cop, the young girl, the hipster, the teacher etc etc. We could say we have bred a new culture for the entertainment of work. It has reached such a level of abstraction over the last decades that we have entered another plane in our socio-economic-lifestyles – one that is equally as uncanny and fantastical as the games we could play for an alternative future.
I believe the greater the parties invisibility the more it opposes. The greater the visibility the more it becomes part of the integrated machine.
Is this a theory?
One can see clearly enough that the play is neither theory, nor its negation but simply something else. Theory has a simple role to make itself understood. Fiction does not but fiction is the apparatus needed before the theory can be set out.
8th October 2016: a simple Facebook message to a user named Dvid Jnas. Tracked down digitally through a friend with a description of his clothing over FB after seeing him across a crowded room at an event hosted monthly called Ying Colosseum, Berlin.
We met exactly seven days later (the night after the full moon) in a Berlin bar filled with ceramic frogs, cigarette smoke and crocheted cushions next to the library. That meeting lasted exactly four hours; it was our shortest meeting. I told him I work with RGP.
We then began a daily correspondence over Facebook messenger, short hurried messages, musings, quoted poetry. One week later we met again and outlined the game, this game was played for five months continuously over digital and live platforms 24/7.
A toolkit created from trace elements of the original game will serve as a basis for a Live RGP enacted by eight players on the opening night of “Deep Intimacy” at GOLD+BETON, Cologne. Omsk Social Club invites viewers to loiter inside the game: the gallery has been transformed into an installed sculptural set for play with a looped 28 minute electronic archival audio work by OMSK Social Club & Vonverhille, which will be played throughout the space, allowing the viewer to eavesdrop over the players’ private games.
GAME
Two roles: the dominant, and the submissive.
GOAL
To create an intensive culture shift in the submissive’s subconscious and lived architecture IRL.
TRACE
FB Messenger discourse / digital dialogues and two Word documents. The documents were required to be the truth, everything else could be fictional, lied, real or played.
The game lasted until 2nd February 2017.
*** Players: Garrett Nelson / Billy Bultheel / Naomi Bisley / Konrad Bohley / Nikolas Brummer / Dagmar Buchentha / Jonathan Omer Mizrahi / Pitt Wenninger
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