Larry Hosken: New: Jotting notes on Odyssey Works' talk at the Adventure Design Group, 2013

Part 1

• Hmm, Gabe was a fine introducer, but he wasn't microphoned. You might want to skip ahead two or three minutes into the video to where things make more sense.
• Abe Burickson, Odyssey Works ringleader talks.
• Starts by having the audience close their eyes so we could better use our imaginations for the "walk-through" of part of an O.W. experience. (It's a relief to watch the video and find out I wasn't missing some amazing visual presentation.)
• The walk-through… the dentist office, the color red, the dancers, the clock radio, the cafe, the theme "The Map is Not the Territory"…
  • This experience is described as it would have been performed for Abe—the color red means something to him; if the performance was for you and red has negative connotations for you, then they would have used another color.
• And we're back in the world, we open our eyes.

Part 2

• Ayden Grout, documenter, speaks. Took on the challenging task of documenting these performances.
• Going to talk about the performance documented in the book Isolation and Amazement, a.k.a. "The Map is Not The Territory".
• We're going to start by learning about Carl.
• (So is "The Map is Not the Territory" something for Abe or something for Carl? Now that I've read Isolation and Amazement, I see that the clock-radio bit, e.g., was part of this performance for Carl. So what experience was described in that walk-through? Was there a "first draft" of "The Map is Not the Territory" sketched out by Abe for Abe? But then adapted for Carl?)
• Carl was an information architect, somewhat scattered, with a strong work ethic.
• Candidate participants fill out a survey. Part of this is keeping a dream journal; and O.W. works with a dream analyst who can pull out unusual bits.
• Oh, Abe's too excited to let Ayden keep talking at us, he's jumping in.
• When sketching out the overall piece, use a timeline. The timeline shows location and activity; but since they're trying to pace an experience, they also have a tempo and an indication of whether each part is more experienced with mind vs body. (Probably it's good to let the audience reflect a bit after the intense stuff?)
  • The mind vs body: this was just for Carl's experience. O.W. thought he might be living in his head too much; much of their thought was when to take him Dionysian vs Apollonian. For another audience, the timeline might have shown something else.
• Well, the overall piece doesn't show up in the timeline. That's just the 36 hours containing the main part of the piece. It doesn't show the foreshadowing that they snuck in during the weeks ahead of time.
• Abe: "In the past we've tried to videotape these [performances] and it's hard. It's a 36-hour performance." (Sounds familiar to folks who've experience a proper weekend The Game game, and sympathized with TV and/or video documentarians trying to record this activity where so much of the experience happens inside the participants' heads.)
• Ayden's talking about how she documents things: pull together still photos and written materials created for the piece. Lots of collaborators create things; gather those things. Put 'em in a book.
  • It's good to be the documenter. All this cool stuff passes through your hands.
• How strange it is to be so aware of the audience. She's learned what Carl looks like, his gait.
• Talks about sneaking foreshadowing into Carl's life ahead of the main performance. An actor playing "Jen" showed up at a friend's party, got Carl talking about dancing, roped him into some movement classes in the park. Jerk in a goat mask occasionally harassed Carl, smooshing him in the face with a pie, squirts him with a water pistol.
• Carl was a Borges fan; so they made a fake book by Xul Solar, like Bacon to Shakespeare, is sometimes suspected of having written Borges' novels. Added notes in the margins, hinting at secret knowledge within the book.
• Carl's Odyssey
• When he woke up on game art day, had text messages from friends: his friend Miles was missing
• Heard the radio excerpt. Sent him to cafe.
• Met Bjorg (Bjorn?), who shared a name with character in Xul novel. Mute, gave Carl written notes for instructions on how to spend rest of day: going places in the city to map their "intensity". This would aid the search for Miles.
• At these locations, there were actors in green shirts doing variations on the theme of making maps: might be drawing map on the ground, might be doing something else. Pace is frantic.
• Cab ride to Samsara Mapping HQ--here, there's mapping, but the pace is slow. Actors here dressed in red. Where green-shirts in park had been twitchy, the red-shirts here are calm, studious, perhaps meditative in their map-making process.
  • This mapping might be traditional cartography; or not. One map: on a window with a view of a skyline, someone drew outlines of the visible buildings. Then adhered cards to the window where the, uhm, energy level of the cards matched those of the there-drawn building.
  • A quiet lunch, making a map that will help find Miles.
• Then goat man chases Carl for 20 blocks. Carl runs to subway station (guided, I suppose, by a companion from GC who knew this was part of the plot?), boards a train, sits down. Is surprised when two passengers near his seat are conversing about the acceleration and decerlation of the train, how it maps to the myth of Sisyphus. Then they turn to Carl and tell him it's time for him to leave the train.
• At the next station, Jen the movement instructor is there. She hands him a rock. Carl's task: let Jen lead him through Central Park as he carries the rock and doesn't talk.
• Various set pieces in the park: friends of Carl's greet him; walk in a pack around him; then go away, taking with them his cell phone, his wallet, his money.
  • Abe jumps in to tell us: this wasn't just hazing. They were trying to put Carl into a mood to receive the impressions he was about to experience.
  …Three ladies on a bench reading a book Carl had put together. Dancers dancing to his favorite song.
• Carl's next task: walk on his own, carrying the heavy rock, for another 50? blocks to a community garden.
• Abe met him there: had scripted some dialog, but when he saw how meditative (exhausted?) Carl was, skipped that and went straight to a quiet dinner.
• After dinner, the Goat Man appeared with some of Carl's friends who tied Carl up and blindfolded him. They put Carl into a box that his girlfriend had constructed to keep him from getting too banged around for the subsequent van-ride-abduction.
• After the ride, he's let out of the box, still blindfolded. He's outdoors; there's chanting. He's led to a wooden stake, tied to it. There's tinder at his feet, he feels the heat of fire.
• And he's freed by Miles, the friend who he was supposed to be trying to rescue all day.
• The bacchanal: in the woods, dancing and chanting around a fire. The rending of flesh; tearing bites from haunches of meat. Several hours of this.
• Blindfolded again, put in car. He fell asleep, exhausted.
• Woke up in a bed in a house in the country, "a new life". "Living" in the house were actors Roger the gardener and Ayden the artist. They feed Carl breakfast, lead him out to the porch where a typewriter awaits him. Carl sits at the typewriter and writes for four hours while Ayden works on her artwork nearby and Roger gardens; each working on their craft. Ayden made some lunch, brought it to Carl, told him that his odyssey was over.
• Gave him the choice between making his own way back or getting a ride from O.W. They had in mind one of Carl's experiences: hitch-hiking. And he chose to make his own way back.
• After the Odyssey
• Carl bought the exact same model of typewriter that he'd worked on at the country house. He wanted to keep writing.
• In the months that followed, Carl changed many things in his life. Broke up with girlfriend. New job. Moved. These changes common after being the audience for a performance.
  • Abe breaks in to say: "And that's just the participants; to say nothing of the artists we work with." Kind of a strange thing to point out, is he teasing someone about some gossip?
• It's not that O.W. wants to change everything about the audience's life. But they do want to shake things up, to show that there's a possibility for change.

Part 3

• Abe's talking again.
• Background: why make art this way?
• We can think of art as how it changes us.
• Background: was at artists' retreat with friend Matt. Talking about subjectivity of art experience; you can create a piece of art, hoping it will change folks. But since folks view each piece of art differently, it's going to affect them differently; few of them will experience it in the way that you hoped.
• What if you could investigate the audience's point of view? What if you built your art around that?
  • A tangent that suggests O.W. spends too much time trying to explain themselves to artists and not enough time talking with folks who just want to get things done:
  • But then what kind of art is this? Most art is made for a multitude, not for one well-understood person.
  • The question about the definition of art became moot when a urinal was put up on a pedestal. (This makes me wonder how I'd pronouce the "Mutt" in "R. Mutt" if I were French.)
  • Whether you're talking about art or games, you want to think of it in terms of the experience, not the object.
• How do you understand your audience then? Give 'em a survey, a questionaire that takes 3-10 hours to finish. Give surveys to the folks around 'em.
• Influences: John Fowles' The Magus. You should read it, but don't see the movie
• Bourriaud's notion of Relational Aesthetics which says that the object isn't the art; the artist's planned experience isn't the art; the set of relations between people (!?) is the thing.
• Systems Theory: Abe was an architect. But it's not enough to think of a building as an object. You must think of how it fits into its context, the surrounding network of streets etc.
  • Don't want their art to be in art's equivalent of the "magic circle". Want art meant to be experienced in the context of a life.
• Two Tenets Generosity, Intimacy
• When Ayden met Abe, she was a jaded NYC art student. But she'd been writing letters to a friend for the past 10 years. Was there some way to capture that intimacy in art? When professors asked "Who is your audience?" There's not a great answer when your answer is "Whoever shows up."
• Abe doesn't think about letters, but about a love poem: you don't write it because you call yourself a poet; you don't write in the same way you'd try to write a cool song. You write it with someone in mind. The art's result isn't public accolades, but a change in a relationship.
• The Future Started a work in Brooklyn.

Part 4

• Q&A
• More O.W. folks come up front for Q&A: Nell Waters, Shoshana Green.
• Q Do you have a measurement of pleasure vs pain so you know how far you can take your audience?
  • Abe: Nope. Our audience is one person and that would be so particular. Also, we're not trying for some The-Game-movie mindfuck.
    (Ayden jumps in—when you heard about Carl's ordeal, you might think that's what we were going for, but not all odysseys are so intense)
    Abe: like Shoshana here was in the second odyssey, and sure we had her tied up in the back of a van
    Shoshana: but that's because I was supposed to be in a chrysalis and would emerge with wings
• Q Ever do any smaller odysseys?
  • Yep, for each other. And try smaller experiments.
• Q (Difficult-to-follow question:) I work in non-profit around art. Folks ask who audience is, it's never easy to answer. Your approach is a breath of fresh air. How do you talk with people about it? (Maybe she means trying to write grants?)
  • Nell: our artists, our actors, volunteer. They get stories.
    Ayden: it's weird how it takes over your life. Afterwards, walking around NYC, I saw places and thought more about why they were important to Carl than why they were important to me.
• Q (was this Deb?) How did you get him to run into the subway station?
  • Ayden: Text messaging helps.
    Abe: It's rigid; you have to work with all kinds of flexibility. There are backup systems.
    Nell: Trial, trial, trial and error.
  • Q But the actors that he overheard…
  • Abe: OK, they were waiting on the platform. So they could see him run in, he's chased in. They know what he looks like. So they could board after him, sit near him.
    We rehearsed, tried it out with fake participants. But people got on the wrong train before. People got arrested before.
    Shoshana: Because they saw a protest, thought it must be part of the narrative.
    Abe: He thought "Aw these aren't real cops; they've got cloth badges. They'd have real handcuffs, they wouldn't zip-tie me."
• Q What's the closest you've been to something going terribly wrong?
  • Nell: You mean like getting pulled over and there's someone tied up in the back of the van? Abe's all "Can't they see I'm in the middle of some performance art right now? I'm changing this woman's life!"
• Q How do you get funding?
  • Abe: Commissions. Like, you can commission it for somebody else. We used to get grants. But now we do festivals. It's a little weird. Like coming up in Brookly, the BEAT Festival, we had to work with them to figure out a way that we're engaging their public.
• Q (This question got lost in the room's echoes to me. Might have been about strangeness of knowing so much about a stranger?)
  • Nell: (something about generosity and intimacy and a fake book signing that might make more sense if I'd understood the question?)
    Ayden: Carl had a strange experience meeting me at my apartment a week after his odyssey. He thought of me as that woman who lived at that house.
    Nell: It's amazing that people share as much as they do. But it has a good effect; it pulls me out of my own neuroses; makes me care about their life. We're generous if we're given a chance to be.
    Shoshana: We started doing this by giving odysseys to each other. We were close; we knew each other really well. We started with that.
• Q When you do foreshawing-ish things in the weeks ahead of an Odyssey, how do you keep the audience from suspecting?
  • Ayden: They don't figure it out. We make it sound like it's obvious. (But in the audience's life, there's no spotlight on those events to say "pay attention to this part".)
    Abe: It's amazing how credulous we all are.