"Can you tell me about a room?"

"What happened there?"

GUEST HOUSE was initially commissioned in 1999, by Arnolfini and DA2, as a performance project exploring the interface between digital media and live presence. The performance takes the spectator on a tour of an "impossible building" composed of rooms and events drawn from other peoples' memories. Everything you see and hear in Guest House was recorded in a series of interviews with friends and strangers.


THE INTERACTIVE GUEST HOUSE imagines the interviewees rooms brought
together in a virtual structure, the form of which alludes both to computer gaming and an architectural 'walk-through'. The CD-ROM takes the project full circle - taking the private recollections of the interviewees, which have been represented in the public performance event, back to being a private and intimate event in the hands of the user. Here, the spectator becomes a player in the work, weaving their own narrative threads through the spaces the company have visualised.

The project forms an on-going attempt to remember spaces from others' memories. Each stage of presentation interrupts, or 'cuts into', the process of remembering and archiving engaged in by the company. Each format or approach is a renewed attempt to produce a sense of these absent spaces in the present, to keep their traces from fading away. With the CD-ROM production and web site we distribute our responsibility for the memories given to us by the interviewees. Now the user must play their part: it is in your hands to practice these spaces, to keep them from becoming inert and disappearing. These spaces from the past, now in the virtual realm, are dependent on your interactive moves, acts which situate them in the present and temporalize them.

 

Development: A Project in 4 Parts

1. In January '99, Uninvited Guests were awarded one of three annual Breathing Space Commissions from Arnolfini Live. Breathing Space offers local and national artists the opportunity to develop new ideas, take risks and make work which pushes at the boundaries between forms. The commission enabled Uninvited Guests to carry out 2 weeks Research and Development for Guest House at Arnolfini. This residency culminated in a work in progress showing as part of the venue's Body-Site season.

2. Guest House was subsequently awarded the Fluid Commission, for new digital performance, by Arnolfini and DA2, Digital Arts Development Agency. Fluid offered support for an innovative performance project exploring the interface between live presence and digital media.

Guest House was produced during a number of residencies: a further 4 weeks at Arnolfini; 3 weeks at Manchester Multimedia Centre in association with Digital Summer '99; 3 weeks at ZKM (Zentrum für Kunst und Medientechnologie, Karlsruhe, Germany). Research and development for the interactive CD-ROM project also commenced during these residencies, at the end of which Thomas Keller produced a fully-functioning Preview Version.

In Autumn '99 the performance of Guest House premiered over 2 nights at Arnolfini as part of Alt.Ctrl.Esc. Guest House then toured to Dartington Arts and Nottingham's eXpo '99.

3. This CD-ROM re-staging of Guest House has been commissioned by DA2, as part of their programme of Digital Art, and by Digital Summer 2000. The CD-ROM is published in association with Arnolfini Live. Guest House CD-ROM has been produced in Frankfurt and Bristol during summer 2000.

The Preview CD-ROM was chosen as an example of good practice for the New Work Network symposium, Documentation: The New Art? at Site Gallery, Sheffield, 1st April 2000. Paul Clarke gave a paper at this symposium which contextualised the interactive CD-ROM as a radical approach to documenting ephemeral live work. Documentation is reviewed in Live Art Magazine, No. 31. The preview version has also been presented as part of a paper on documentation by Sophia Lycouris (Nottingham Trent University/Kunstwerk-Blend), at the Research into Practice conference, University of Hertfordshire and by Steve Dixon (University of Salford/Digital Performance Archive) at the Digital Scenography conference, University of Kent. Extracts from the work were chosen to be projected on a video wall at the Sparks Festival, London, September 2000 as part of a showcase by the Digital Performance Archive.

The completed version of Guest House CD-ROM was launched at [space inter:face] a Digital Summer event at Manchester's Green Room. [space inter:face] was a series of events exploring what happens when the live stage collides with the virtual realm. Uninvited Guests presented a performative tour of the interactive Guest House. The CD-ROM was launched in Bristol at Arnolfini alongside performances of Film, the company's new touring project.

4. A web-based re-staging of Guest House in the form of a popular memory game, is accessible at_ http://www.da2.org.uk/guesthouse

This site was developed with Neil Jenkins of Devoid in association with DA2 and uses Shockwave 7.

 

For this project Uninvited Guests were:

Paul Clarke | Liam Fahey | Jessica Hoffmann
Thomas Keller | Jessica Marlowe | Ben Slater

 

Unvited Guests is a UK/German company founded in 1998 and based in Bristol. The company is dedicated to making innovative collaborative work which challenges the boundaries between art-forms and opens live work to new audiences. Technology forms an integral aspect of its work, however the company's technique is characterised by a 'hands on' approach which makes visible the tools of representation, combining high tech with low tech, the visceral with the virtual.