Art project, Obtentus
Performance Game
August 2010
Crack the Riddle to see the movie:
“Where you loose yourselves to be found”
Concept
Desert Girls was a 24-hour performance fiction including a real world business meeting. OBTENTUS created a exclusive game for the performance in collaboration with READY-MADE.
The game included puzzle solving, game artefacts and human programming of the performers.
The Fiction
In a fake city built of plastics in all colors and shapes, a young man has escaped or just taken a break. He is the ruler of the city and he carries a secret unknown to all others. His secret keeps him with power, as no man or woman dares to kill him or challenge him. Everybody knows that this secret gives him all his wealth and supremacy. All the love he knows is fake, as fake as the flowers under his bed. People will smile to his face, but when no eyes rest on them, their eyes turn grey. The young ruler knows this, this is why he is now wandering the desert, alone…
Three young women, the desert girls, have been living at a deserted gas-station in the middle of the desert for many years. They have lost count on how many years, but they do know that it is three sandstorms and nine vinylspins since they occupied the space. In the desert a storm can either tear you apart or create you. Sand and the sound of the wind, or the sound of no wind, mixing with the squeaking sound from the old sign hanging by the road is all there is.
One evening the desert girls are having one of their vinylspinning hangouts in front of the gas-station, all dressed up in their finest clothes, the colored lights brightening their faces with nuances of red, yellow and green. One of the girls is smoking heavily, steadily but slow. Her leg is hypnotically moving back and forth and her eyes rest on the horizon. The two others are silently trying to fix an unknown device. The vinyl is spinning, music from long gone times moving through the desert winds caressing the station. Nothing else has happened apart from the storms, at this deserted place during all this time. Until that moment.
The young ruler is stumbling through the sand, struggling to get to the place with the music and the lights. The pain and shock in his body is unbearable to him. A poisonous snake has cut through his heel some miles back, leaving him to die more with each step he takes.
The smoking desert girl sees him, but just observes him coming closer. When he is near by, the other two girls hear him and they stand up, but say nothing, just observe. He awkwardly falls before them. The sand twirls up around his fever struck body. The girls just look at him, faces cool but attentive. The smoking girl leans down, she senses he is trying to say something. Her ear close to his mouth; it seems he is telling her something. Her eyes suddenly open wide and she leaps back.
He dies… And everything changed…
Process
Credit
Fiction created by Fiction Pimps
Cross-Reality Game by Jakob la Cour, Obtentus & Jesper Pedersen, Ready-made
Performers: Inga Gerner Nielsen, Madeleine Kate, Gry Worre Hallberg, Trine Mee Sook Gleerup, Ken, Claudius Pratt, Karin Dam Nordlund, Jens og Yogi Horn
Movie and Photos from the game by Meeto Worre Kronborg Grevsen