The Living Virtual Theatre (2020)

Omsk Social Club began creating intuitive gaming boards in 2019. These boards acted as both aesthetic artistic objects that can be viewed in a native gallery setting and/or they were designed to offer a gateway into their conceptual practice of Real Game Play*​.​ ​

Gateways naturally presume a space of transition, yet perhaps the boards offer more of a crossroads than a simple choice to enter or not. As there are so many routes, one can take with these boards, an infinite number of possibilities can be born or rejected across these boards.

Historically, Crossroads are extremely charged spaces – choices have to be made, fears, facts and fictions overlap and of course the acknowledgement that choosing one path immediately closes down another. The anthropologist Victor Turner notes that Crossroads create “liminal zones” ambiguous threats and potent transformations are promised from this hybrid of cultural geography.

Another liminal zone that is ever more present in our fates and fabrications of narratives is the internet and the Game boards were designed with the architecture of the world wide web in mind. Symbols appear as do uncuffed words – one finds the recognisable along with jargon and chaos. This new mode of communication technology, the internet materially embodies our ability to discover and exploit natural laws through the exercise of reason, it is but all form of humanity rotting in its beautiful abyss.

And to survive you have to keep moving, as you do with the Game boards do not let your rational mind close your intuitive core that is the only rule of understanding the simulation we live in both in fiction and reality.

The Living Virtual Theatre e​xamines the notion of Chapel Perilous: A Temporary Decentralized Temple inspired by Simone Weil, Robert Anton Wilson, thee temple ov psychick youth and many other practitioners of reality crafting. The board guides the user’s unconscious mind through pathways such as the Bootcamp for losing yourself in ten easy steps or lucid dying in the age of Necropolitics.

Each route will offer a new set of horizons, allowing the viewer to perform an entangled reading of the work and their own lived reality. Omsk Social Club declares the only way to really view this work is participation as the perception of viewing, over the opening weekend there will also be guides that take the viewer deeper into the work and their unconscious landscape.

*A live action role-playing game (LARP) is a form of role playing game (rpg) where the participants physically act out their characters’ actions.

Real Game Play (RGP) mutation of rpg see above, is a combination of Larp and your own identity/lived experience – think of it like a meta structure of you and the character given to you to act out.