LARPing Through Life: An Excerpt from Internet_Art
Earlier this year, Phaidon published Internet_Art: From the Birth of the Web to the Rise of NFTs, the most comprehensive social history on our contemporary culture, #internetart inclusive, out there. Over the coming weeks, Age of Anxiety contributors select three randomly chosen excerpts for readers.
Cao Fei, COSPlayers, 2004 _single-channel video, 8 mins.
LARPing Through Life
I discovered Live Action Role-Play (LARPing) when visiting my father in the midwestern United States. It was the late 1990s and LARP was considered the apex of the geek maxim, so much so that I recoiled at the thought of pursuing it. I was mortified when my parent attempted to enroll me in the re-enactment of an American Civil War event. We settled on a compromise of watching the action rather than participating. The role-playing was staged on a small set and seemed like little more than a hobby for aspiring actors. I assumed it would remain a pastime restricted to an esoteric group. How wrong I was.
In 2004, the artist Cao Fei produced the cinematic installation titled COSplayers. Set in her native city of Guangzhou, China, myriad cosplayer (costume player) youth are seen taking on the visual personas of vid- eo-game characters, from pixie princesses to magnanimous knights, to transcend what Cao argued at the time was their disenchantment with their lived experience. She crafted a space where they could traverse the city at will, without the implicit judgment that awaited them when they returned home to transfer from their alter egos back into reality. Fast-forward to 2021 and statistics reveal that LARPing is the “hottest entertainment trend in China.” In a study by media agency iiMedia, 84.9 percent of Chinese internet users who took the survey revealed themselves to have engaged in a LARP game of some form. LARP now also exists online, contradictory as that might at first seem, and has involved narratives that are often inspired by TV programs. The most popular form of this game among young Chinese netizens, it is reported, often involves players seeking to collectively solve a murder mystery. Now a multibillion-dollar business, the proliferation of the form, with its specific dress, rules, and active presence, represents a fascinating blurring with the avatar culture deployed in virtual environments such as Second Life. Within this juncture, any person can transpose them- selves into a character chosen from a list, adopt the necessary instructions and rules, and sneak off the container that is the screen into another life.
Ed Fornieles, Cel, 2019 _Two-channel video, 40 mins. 21 sec. Image courtesy Carlos Ishikawa
An imaginative artwork to critically explore this phenomenon is Ed Fornieles’s Cel (2019). In a staging of a LARP event, the artist sought to interrogate the growth of toxic masculinity in mainstream society, especially among online hate groups led by what the artist calls individuals who “encourage fear, hatred, and mass repression” and have extensive online followings. This phenomenon, it is intimated in the accompanying publication text, is as much the result of a culture of emasculating hazing found in college fraternity culture as it is connected to the different ideologies that underpin male anger.
The ten participants in Fornieles’s game took on the role of members of a fictional alt-right group who were on a quest for self-betterment. Over the course of what we are informed are three days, we see characters that are pinned down and waterboarded, reduced to infantile behavior and sometimes tears. Audiences witness these simulated acts—the threshold of real and unreal always unclear— across two large screens and through an attendant publication. Cel envisages how power is used and ideology constructed in multiple forms of roles across society. It examines how the culture of role- play can operate as a mechanism for developing an embodied context that emerges from the virtual realm, which might enable us to comprehend varying facets shaping contemporary identity. No longer a subculture, LARP is now used for academic research purposes, to explore connections between geolocative technologies, interactive gaming methods, and the social strata of the players who engage with it. It has also been reported that high-school, college, and university educators use LARP as a method for immersing their students in history. In 2018, the Guardian newspaper reported that communities had begun using LARP to go back in time and experience specific historical ruptures—for example, facing the traumas of the AIDS pandemic and the lived experience of exiled refugees. The physical act of role-play in this context seemingly creates an emotional link between the persona and the historical subject, cultivating connections that would otherwise not exist.
Anita Fontaine, who refers to herself as a “speculative future artist,” creates LARP-like gaming environments using VR software—what I argue is an in-between or interstitial form of embodiment. During the COVID-19 pandemic, she created Corona Paraíso Secreto VR (2020), an immersive jungle and beach experience intended to submerge the viewer’s senses and let them feel as if they were outdoors. In her Bitmap Banshees (2016), VR trans- ports the viewer to the streets of Amsterdam—now a psychedelic sci-fi backwater. While riding a bike, viewers collect supernatural carrots to save themselves and the city—throwing them at the banshees that attempt to destroy them. As part of the Abandon Normal Devices Festival in 2021, Fontaine reimagined the experience of the touristic boat tour. When passengers boarded The Blue Violet River (2021), Liverpool’s iconic waterfront became animated using AR forms. The skyline was overtaken by dancers, a living rainbow, and air balloons overhead crafted in the shapes of hands casting spells and wielding a protective meditative rulebook.
If you enjoyed what you read, check back for forthcoming excerpts!