{"id":41596,"date":"2016-11-26T19:01:23","date_gmt":"2016-11-26T18:01:23","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.sleek-mag.com\/?p=41596"},"modified":"2016-11-26T19:01:23","modified_gmt":"2016-11-26T18:01:23","slug":"larp-hack-institution","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.sleek-mag.com\/de\/article\/larp-hack-institution\/","title":{"rendered":"This Artist is Using Larp to Hack the Institution"},"content":{"rendered":"

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\nThe artist Omsk Social Club Feat. PUNK IS DADA<\/a> \u2014 her name is an ever-evolving pseudonym \u2014 recently staged a \u201cmeta-larp\u201d at the Migros Museum f\u00fcr Gegenwartskunst. Larp, which stands for live-action roleplaying game, is a genre that conjures imagery of fantasy-inspired battles with foam swords. But today\u2019s larps have evolved and are ever more present in art institutions. The artist told us how using larp, together with new media and off-site livestreaming, she\u2019s working with the concept of maximalism. This philosophy is \u201cmore is more\u201d as opposed to the \u201cless is more\u201d motto of minimalism. Hence she adds layer after layer of abstraction, hacking multiple levels of the institution \u2014 from the storage depot to the website to the exhibition space.\u00a0 We spoke to the artist about the artwork \u201cScene Afterform: Bona-fide Sites and the Meta Community\u201d, which exposes reality as a contradictory mixture of opposites: on and offline, IRL and URL, real and unreal.
\nSLEEK: You\u2019ve made a work that intersects concrete with virtual reality. Using new media and larp, you\u2019ve chosen to hyperlink the physical space of the host institution with its usually invisible storage depot. Why?<\/strong> \nOmsk Social Club Feat. PUNK IS DADA: We yearn to belong to a solid-state community and the museum is exactly that. Linking the storage and web devices became a way for me to maneuver our present material conditioning of the institution to inform a more psychological aesthetic rethinking of the self, community, and object via a communal cross stature gesture. Invisibility teamed with visibility can be a very effective tool for re-thinking, not only as a site but also a mental space.
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\nHow do we navigate museums, and how do they center our movement? The viewer is a kind of node moving throughout the museum that gains information through familiar tactics, mostly linguistic. In my work, there are numerous participants that act as sites and larp nodes that are active inside the museum, offsite and online. There are all these different metaphysical and physical manifestations of the project itself. It works through maximalism, distorting the viewer\u2019s ability to find an institutionalized path, because the path has always been hacked and is getting re-hacked \u2014 an Anamorphic device.
\nSLEEK: So we could see viewers as nodes syncing up with your larp nodes, rather than as typical viewers following a curated experience.<\/strong> \nOSCFPID: The way in which I use larp isn\u2019t necessarily a functional manifestation of a larp. I\u2019m using it more as a starting point, and a point to subvert from. I see it as a meta-larp, because it\u2019s using characters and motifs, and I orchestrate and switch spaces (real and figuratively) over the eight hours, which is the narrative of a larp typically, but I\u2019m also working a lot within the psychological real space of the participant, too. I mimic the digital and the real world that we\u2019re constantly trying to map and negotiate by offering it as a kind of dummy run through terrain \u2014 or a live simulation.
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\nSLEEK: Why would you choose exactly larp, or why do you choose to call it larp instead of any other form of participation?<\/strong> \nOSCFPID: If you call something a larp, it gives the person who participates in it a moment to be completely free. They can enact themselves, or they can enact a character. You as the onlooker cannot tell if that person is them or if it\u2019s a character they\u2019re playing.
\nSLEEK: You make a reference to meta-community in the title of your work. What does that mean?<\/strong> \nOSCFPID: I think that the real community, or the way in which we can really change and create community is actually by looking at ourselves first. So literally the work is re\/enacting community within the community from a singular\/cellular identity which creates the meta.
\nThe meta-community is a concept or higher level of abstraction to our current ideas of community. It allows you to move quite swiftly between digital \u2014 on to offline, IRL to URL, in this case the museum to the storage, the audience to the abstract. It allows the hours of the community to flow and ebb as one unit producing. This is how I came to the ideology of the meta-community \u2014 all of these units are producing alongside each other, and that\u2019s what gives the final outcome, our so-called meta state.
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\nSLEEK: You\u2019re incorporating social media features into the institution itself to approach what you are getting at with the construction of community based on individual agency.<\/strong> \nOSCFPID: Yeah, I think that\u2019s exactly what I\u2019m trying to do: mimic a revolution of digital\/social life via IRL to URL. And of course, we can always speak about reality as everything that presents itself but do we even have a natural reality any longer? I guess that\u2019s something I want to bring to the viewer, to un-inform their ideas of reality, and technologically un-arm their gaze, and show that everything\u2019s is as real or as unreal as the other.
\nI guess that\u2019s really the crux of why I use larp because, for me, your self is your largest commodity today. And it\u2019s yours. \u201cUn-\u201d is the prefix to the \u201creal,\u201d and as soon as you understand where your real is and where you\u2019re unreal is, I think you have a very powerful agency.
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