NETWORK CULTURE

Since the mid 1990s, the group followed the trajectory of the development of the media, with their acute and in-depth psychological analyses. I would call them the most contemporary media-poet of this age.

• Soh Yeong Roh, Head of the Selection Committee for the 2016 Nam June Paik Art Center Award

Blast Theory is a pioneering and multi-faceted artists group that creates interactive, thought-provoking and complex artworks that traverse media, form, and modes of communication systems. The artists come from diverse backgrounds grounded in art theory, theatre and new media art forms like gaming and broadcast media. As a result of this hybrid of characteristics and peculiarities, there is a collective rootedness to placing the audience at the centre of their work. In so doing, numerous projects constructed and situated by Blast Theory blurs the boundary between art and life and the mechanisms of control. This essay will investigate how Kidnap (1998) has brought forth a particular/peculiar oeuvre of interactive artworks that deftly challenges the fluid boundary between fact and fiction and uses technology to alter the viewer experience. The artwork itself will not be covered in depth, for there is much to be read about on the internet.

Kidnap as more than an artwork

Kidnap required extensive consultations with a legal firm about the legal and ethical aspects of making the artwork, all this before it eventually took place in West London. In mid-1990s UK, the fear of being kidnapped off the streets was genuine and mounting. Coupled with an increasing rate of kidnap cases and concerns over the country’s economic situation, Blast Theory’s work brought with it far-reaching social and political commentary. In an interview with Blast Theory’s Matt Adams, he elaborates that:

This is a piece about kidnapping, an incredibly powerful political and pop-cultural social force. During the 1970s, some of the most important political discussions in Western urban culture were happening via the medium of kidnapping, if you look at the Baader-Meinhof gang in Germany, for example.

Blast Theory, Kidnap (1998) courtesy of Blast Theory

From here, we see that Blast Theory has instrumentally created a multi-layered artwork that is not only acutely psychological in its intent, it poignantly engages with the participant (and the audience), and on a more socio-cultural level asked particular questions about the culture in which we live in- it is inherently attaching itself to making a political comment. In the same interview, Matt Adams commented on how Blast Theory interfaces the digital with the physical, where the real collides with the virtual.

Blast Theory as collaborators

The latter sophisticated use of technology, savvy collaborations with art institutions (like Institute of Contemporary Art, London) and tie-ins with art colleges (like the University of Nottingham), opened up vast opportunities for the group to bring their interactive art to interface with the larger public and receive huge media coverage globally. All this started with the dramaturgy that is Kidnap (1998), where the audience actually does it themselves– they become the art. It is with the radicality and open-ness that was Kidnap that enabled the media, art historians and media theorists to engage in conversation, collaborations and commissions for future projects.

Audience interacts and becomes the art

 Do what?

Blast Theory, Kidnap (1998) courtesy of Blast Theory

Be the artwork, be in the centre of the piece, be fifty percent of the artwork, quoting Adam’s once again.

More importantly, the work questions the kidnapped (and at times the kidnapper as well) on how they make sense of the world, whereas one lives in an age of increasing ‘technologisation’ are overwhelmed with different sources of information. Kidnap is an example of a Tabula Rasa for which as discussed by Slavoj Zizek in The Desert of the Real, a whole new reality (for the kidnapped and the kidnapper) is created and at the same time the viewer (for example the writer who only encountered the work 20 years later) and various visitors to websites, articles, and journals about the work and the various documentation on YouTube, Instagram, and Vimeo is torn between being caught in this mixed reality. This so-called ‘game’ co-constructed by participant and artists stems from the idea that an interface to a virtual world could be thought of as a permeable, bi-directional, and potentially traversable “mixed reality boundary” between the physical and virtual.

The complexity of the work allows participants on either side to see – and ultimately to cross over into – the other. The value and longevity of the work reside in how the idea and contestations within the work outlive the performance itself. On one level, the performative environment resided in 1998, where several things competed simultaneously with the audience’s attention, but in watching and re-watching the sequence of events unfolding, within an uncomfortable context, the poignancy of the work is further exacerbated by the nature of it being an archive of an event 20 years ago, we are quick to ask- so what happened to the participants? What was the impact of the work on the kidnapped (The kidnapped was ‘chosen’ through a very British social past-time- The Lottery)? 

In the Politics of New Media Theatre, Gabriella Giannachi presented Blast Theory’s work as political. Not because of the spaces created by the artists’ group that is socially transformative and at times aesthetically appealing, but more importantly because the artworks (or can we still call them art?) problematizes the way in which technology is used as a lens/language to experience everydayness. She says:

Here, technology does impact directly on whom we choose to be, in our relationships with others and in our engagement with locality as materiality, and in the ways these inform each other. So, as Adams suggests, Kidnap is about ‘giving up control’, but also being controlled. about looking and being looked at. It is about trust and endurance.    

With this, we are able to see the artists group as a collective looking to poke at the fabrics of society and our culture at large. Through the lens of art, where not only art objects, installations or interactive situations are created- a strong political message is sent out to the public(s), the new(s) media and government(s) as well. Blast Theory plays with the communication systems and produces work that can potentially be socially and politically transformative. Through their terrain of ideas, Blast Theory has explored humanity and what it means to exists in this city, this day and this age of post-modernity. Kidnap and the many artworks that Blast Theory has conjured up in the last twenty years have managed to make art that can not only poetically resonate but also seek viewers (and participants) to reflect upon. Such is the reach and multi-faceted approach of using art as language, that at times the ‘contemporary media-poets of this age’ seems to exert the same level of control as the work Kidnap did its viewers.