Abstract

Fortnight is a two-week long, fully immersive, experience based in the interactions and communications of daily life. Up to 200 participants sign up to receive messages that are sent to their mobile phones, email, and home address; these messages contain a series of poetic nudges that encourage those participating to question their sense of place. Participants also receive daily invitations to visit locations throughout their city where they can pause to reflect on what it means to be here now.

Fortnight enables the experience of “theatre” to penetrate beneath a seemingly brittle aesthetic surface of performance, deep into the consciousnesses of our participants as they begin to interact with and perceive world around us as the performance itself; the place where we act out our own daily lives. In Fortnight, the spectator becomes participant; the journey becomes narrative.

Fortnight therefore subverts the notion of an audience, in which each spectator’s perspective is forced to examine not the situation and setting of performers on a stage, but rather the situation and setting of our own sense of place and the meaning we apportion to our everyday lives.

Fortnight uses various forms of ubiquitous technology such as: Radio Frequency Identification (aka, RFID tags of the type contained in key fobs), which are used in badges sent to each participant that allow them to interact with real-world “portals” to trigger certain effects in their surroundings; QR technology (in the form of barcodes on posters that reveal additional hidden messages, should the participant choose to delve further; SMS messages; email; and, Twitter. Alongside this, older modes of communication such as handwritten letters, give Fortnight a decidedly low-fi aesthetic. Throughout Fortnight, participants are encouraged to explore the creative possibilities of pervasive and communicative media without reverting to mere technological fetishism. In Fortnight, each mode of communication is used not only for its functionality but also as symbols that bind the project and the participant together, rooting them to the here and now with the everyday tools of modern society.

The mediated messages within Fortnight lead participants down a living, breathing rabbit hole where the familiar becomes unfamiliar and reality distorts. The project becomes an experience for the participant that is as immersive as their own life; creating an alternative reality, that not only co-exists alongside their own everyday realities, but also merges with them.This is a performance with shared responsibilities, reflecting the actions and consequences of our daily lives: what we put in, we get out.