deviator – pvi collective

Overview

Turn Sydney's urban jungle into an urban jungle gym: play deviator by notorious Western Australian new media art collective pvi. Their site-specific project is here as part of the International Symposium on Electronic Art and runs from June 11-16.

Over the course of an hour, using a smartphone provided, participants (or deviators) seek out hidden audio instructions and perform up to 15 interventions and interactions, turning the world into a playground. You could find yourself guerrilla pole-dancing or playing spin the bottle in public or sack racing or WHO KNOWS what else. You will, if you do it.

But this is more than just a game. This is a call to arms (and legs) to get people out onto the streets, to reclaim them for revolutionary fun, to ignore commerce and to start a new narrative. What does playing a game mean as an adult? How can games alter your reality and open up new possibilities? deviator is inspired by psycho-geography, by modern-day revolution, anti-materialism and political interventionism. This is an opportunity to stop signing petitions on Facebook and start engaging with what's really happening, or not happening, and to start making it happen.

Deviator is part of the Switched On season at Performance Space, which is part of ISEA (itself under the umbrella of Vivid this year). The works featured each take something from the electronic world and combine it with other practices such as theatre, dance and sound. You'll be able to watch as experimental dance meets motion-sensing technology in Breathing Monster by French choreographer Myriam Gourfink, consider how a person sits through dialysis in Body Fluid II (Redux) and consider what human society should put down for posterity with the launch of the Forever Now project, to be concluded at MONAFOMA 2014.

Image by Lucy Parakhina.