Blast Theory: art that mixes 90s clubbing culture with "escaping the boredom" of being you

Working at the intersection of club culture, live art, immersive theatre and digital design, Brighton-Based art collective Blast Theory celebrates its 25th birthday this year. Throughout this month, the team of artists, designers and developers are showing Operation Black Antler, a co-creation with Hydrocracker and co-commissioned by Ideas Test & Brighton Festival, across their home city, a piece that examines ideas of personal data-sharing and surveillance and in which the audience is integral to the work’s narrative.

Throughout its existence Blast Theory has worked in a highly collaborative way across the disciplines, foreshadowing much of today’s immersive theatre productions and works that use tech to encourage audience agency or heighten experience. Having just opened their latest show, we wanted to find out more from one of the group’s leaders, Matt Adams, (the others are Ju Row Farr and Nic Tandavanitjk) about what they do, why they do it, and how their audiences have changed over the decades.

I read that your early work was informed by early 90s club culture, can you tell me a bit more about that?

We made a number of projects in the 90s that looked at places where you could lose yourself, either in clubs or performances or drugs or anger. One of the most defining experiences of my life was being in the poll tax riots and it was an incredible experience of chaos or power. Even within our app project Karen, we were still trying to create a space where you can be other than yourself for a while. Our annual seminar is called Act Otherwise, as we want to give people a chance to try on a different skin for a while.

I spoke to one of the audience after our last show and he said “it’s so fucking boring being me”, which I think sums it up. We do get trapped into certain ways of behaving and how we speak and how we see the world. Art, culture and design are ways for us to see the world differently. It’s about being able to ask new questions about the world we live in.

Now that there are a lot more immersive theatre productions around, and people are more used to that sort of art, have your audiences changed in how they interact with the work?

I think things have changed. The first big game project we did was called Desert Rain in 1999, and it went from a virtual game to a documentary where you find out that some of the participants had been fighting in the Gulf War in 1991. At that time there was a big division between a games and a theatre audience: with theatre, people expected a production to come to them, and a games audience was more than happy to run around pulling levers and things.

Today, audiences are increasingly up for taking risks and facing difficult situations. We’re trying to test the limits of audience agency so we’re trying to give you as much control and power in a piece of work as we can, and at the same time have an experience that’s very tightly authored and controlled to give you a good time.

Why do you think immersive theatre and participatory art forms have increased in popularity so dramatically?

I think that it’s a couple of things. It’s important to recognise that that’s going on in pure digital culture, too – in games and interaction design pieces are getting more ambitious and are pushing at the limits of storytelling and complexity in those experiences. With work like ours, hybrid works with a performative element, there’s a thrill to the live that is always present.

A live experience is a place where your sense of the world can shift forever, and I occasionally meet people who did a project ten or 15 years ago and they remember this element or this visual image, and it’s because something about the world has slightly shifted in them. It might be a minute thing, but there’s a currency that’s unique to you in that moment. A live event is different every night – in the show we’re doing now it’s always mercurial; it’s not a West End thing where we do The Lion King for the thousandth time – that’s the thrill, both to make it and to see it.

What do you want people to take away from your work?

With Operation Black Antler, which opened at the weekend, people are coming away concerned and exhilarated in equal measure, which is what we want really.

We’re always looking for your adrenaline to kick in at one point or another, and that can be through excitement but often it’s through making you feel productively unnerved about something. We often make experiences where the edge of the work isn’t easily obvious. When we make work in public places you’re not sure if the sirens blazing are part of it or not, and people will stop and ask for directions – you’re constantly questioning what’s real and what’s not within the work. It means your senses are really engaged and you’re not always sure if you’re doing something that we’ve intended.

That does mean we have an additional responsibility for the safety of our audience and their comfort, so we have to try and control that. But it also means random things can and do happen and people play with the rules. People increasingly want experiences that are deeply immersive and participatory, and where they have agency within a piece of work.