voidspace live 2024

A festival of forking paths in which You Are The... whatever you choose...

Back in June, I had the honour of being the opening performer at the very first voidspace live - a new festival of interactive arts, hosted by the webzine of the same name, at London’s Theatre Deli. I was there to involve the audience in a playthrough of my ‘Fantasy Gamepoem’ which featured in the zine’s first issue in 2022.

The festival took over a large part of the venue’s network of rooms, some of which played host to live performances and others to static installations of interactive art, while QR codes and laptops allowed us to explore the voidspace and beyond in a communal spirit of discovery.

While Fantasy Gamepoem is a bit of a lighthearted diversion, it was the first of several ‘interactive poems’, and each of my fellow voiders who performed their compositions in the Deli seemed to lean further into the aesthetic and emotional possibilities of this rarely-seen format.

Neil Wilcox’ Ghost Turtle looks and feels just like a (very) old-school computer game. The poem itself honours the little sprite turtle, and in insisting that that reptiloid digital artefact is ‘not [our] bitch’ - despite the fact it seems to move very directly according to the whims of the player - it invites the possibility of a life beyond what we can see. Where might the creature swim after the end of the game? There was something transcendent in its nostalgic simplicity.

Jo Gatford invited us to interrogate those Two Wolves that infamously live inside us. Her piece is funny and surprising, without ever letting us forget how ravenous those internal canidae can be.

And finally amongst we café poets, Mark Ward presented Faultlines - a work of particular note among aficionados of ‘the void’, since it’s embodied as the first physical publication from voidspace press. An extraordinary text which combines the empathetic draw of confessional poetry with the narrative twists of gamebook mechanics, Ward’s exploded sonnet stands as a model for the potential of the form. Experiencing it as part of an audience making communal choices was especially powerful, as we seemed to veer between options that were compassionate or cruel; particularly considering that we were guiding the poet back through his own choices.

You can experience all of these Deli-delivered pieces for yourselves to some degree - just follow the links to the titles above, and you can play along much as we did. But for the rest of the event - you had to be there to get the full effect.

Interactive art is all about choices. This expressed itself further within the format of the event - on arrival, we were asked to queue for guidance as to which rooms we should report to later, at what times, contingent on the choices we’d made before arrival. Whenever you’re at a festival with more than one stage, you’re conscious that you’re making choices all the way along - every act you see means missing others. But something about the emphasis on interactivity and immersion at voidspace live made this sense that we were choosing-our-own-festival even more acute. I found that I was conscious of others, in other rooms, not just watching acts but having quite different immersive experiences because of the choices that they’d made.

My own first such was The Unbuilt Room by Seth Kriebel. Here, the audience sat in a ring with Kriebel as a focal point. The set-up evokes what might be an ancient fireside storytelling space, fittingly considering that his other shows include versions of Beowulf and The Death of King Arthur. But this story is at once much more modern, and yet still feels like literary archaeology: in The Unbuilt Room, Kriebel transforms himself into the if/then narrative machine of a 1980s text adventure. ‘Go East’, we can tell him. ‘Go North’. ‘Look at the bucket’. And for the most part, branching very far - or at all - outside of the anticipated instructions gets short shrift. That sounds banal, but it didn’t feel like it in the room - or at least, when it did, it was a self-aware banality, us all laughing along at our frustrations with the ‘computer says no’ moments. And of course, Kriebel as a skilled human performer is able to respond to surprises, and surprise us in turn, vastly more flexibly than a text adventure ever could. The Unbuilt Room is at once a feat of memory, and a shared puzzle - but its finest moments are when opening certain doors, or performing certain tasks, prompt Kriebel to rise from his chair and stand to recite sublime lines that go way beyond the compass points and functions that got us there. Then, when we finally figure out our way to the eponymous Unbuilt Room, a great flip occurs. To keep this as spoiler-free as possible, I won’t say exactly what that flip is, other than that the chaos that ensues in the narrative only serves to underline the practised skill of the writer/performer and the importance of preparation…

After that, I made a choice that only five of us did (and could) - Jenny Dunn was facilitating a performance of Martin L Jones’ mini-LARP The Judgement of Solomon, which called for exactly five participants. I got to be Solomon! How many events can you go along to and come away saying you had a title role?! In the roleplay, lawyers for super-hi-tech companies were fighting for the right to support the child of characters named Adam and Eve, and I played the not-quite-psychic judge who would decide the babe’s fate. I was possibly more nervous about sitting in judgement on these fictional characters than I was about performing my own poem earlier on. In the end, indeed, I regretted the call I made and felt I really should have gone for the other company… (ah, the mystery yet again, of the path-not-taken). If you’ve ever played this mini-LARP, let me know how it went for you. The experience made me wonder how much real-life judges mull over their decisions when it’s too late to change them. (Hopefully those who sit on the UK Supreme Court lose sleep over some of theirs every single night)

The final stop for me in this festival of forking paths was at Chloe Mashiter’s ‘This Time (Travel) Will Be Different’. This was a workshop for people with experience of time travel - I have to confess I attended despite very minimal personal experience with that technology (I have a sneaking suspicion that I may not have been the only imposter in the room). We learned afterwards that this was Mashiter’s first ever performance (delivery?) of this workshop, which amazed myself and other participants, as they seemed to inhabit the role of a flustered facilitator with consummate and well-rehearsed ease. The format, in which the challenges of this exotic science-fictional technology is explored within the familiarly banal setting of a brain-storming, ‘let’s-put-you-into-groups’ workshop (complete with post-it-notes), is brilliant - and it makes a lot of mishaps that might have been hard to forgive in other settings feel cohesive. (The posters aren’t sticking to the boards properly? Well, that happens in these kinds of situations, doesn’t it…?) To say that, though, is to overlook the really extraordinary effect which Mashiter achieves in this performance. There are two points of particularly brilliant magic, aside from the uncannily convincing setting of the workshop itself. In one, they feed our throwaway post-it-note responses back to us as cathartic, transcendent poetry. And in the other… well, you might see the other coming. But it doesn’t make it any less effective when it does, and you find yourself right back where you started, and everything the same but somehow different.

It’s a testament to the impactive power of these works that I could have done, seen (been?) more, but chose to leave while things were still going on. I really felt I’d been enough people in enough worlds for one day.

Voidspace Live is confirmed to return as a two-day festival in 2025, and fundraising rewards including tickets are available now.