ARGARMENIA ALTERNATE REALITY GAMING, TUMO – CENTER FOR CREATIVE TECHNOLOGIES, YEREVAN, ARMENIA, 2013

This video piece lies somewhere between a document and a work in itself. It is not a documentary film, reality TV, or a film in the conventional sense. This moving image work can either be viewed as a two channel projection or viewed in single channel format – split screen. Currently, it is without English subtitles.

Even though at times both screens do occasionally depict the same event taking place at different intervals, predominantly the left hand side of the split screen is captured footage from three months in Yerevan that documents my everyday experience living as an outsider in a foreign country. Some of the footage includes historical war footage, park concerts, countryside tours to ancient temples and churches, local protests, cultural and religious rituals, and the final exhibition of classroom pedagogical processes. While on the right hand side of the screen the edited footage documents fragments from the actual in-game play of the Alternate Reality Games between three teams (red, orange and blue) that took place between players and game developers on the 8th, 14th and the 15th of December throughout Yerevan City.

Both narratives are meant to expand our understanding of what Alternate Reality is and how it functions in real-time and in real-space? And lastly, how as a record of these events it further serves to exaggerate our removal from the reality of the game by emphasizing our outsidedness from what is unfolding onscreen. The spectatorship of Alternate Reality Gaming serves both to undermine the meaning behind the narratives glimpsed post-event as well as to illicit a certain level of intrigue and puzzlement as to their meanings. This was one of the reasons for the editing decisions behind the use of the footage in order to find a suitable way to bridge both of these problems of spectatorship and outsidedness by re-enacting something on-screen which is fragmented and incomplete with something which seems more concrete and personal such as my everyday chance encounters with specific cultural phenomena.

The three month residency at Tumo was also an important opportunity to develop the pedagogical processes behind the ARG learning models, which included workshops held in class that introduced participants to new technological design techniques, script writing for games, playing the completed ARG, and the final design and presentation of the exhibition. All three processes aimed to develop students’ ideas on narrative structure, the delivery of their stories to the surrounding communities, the ways these interface with the surrounding landscape using new technologies, hardware and software applications and how to prepare, plan and design an exhibition for these past events.