The Cyber & Material Character 1: weplay4unow.com

For two weeks, four of us, who are real and not real, a presence and a pretence, embodied and disembodied, a fantasy and a fact, will play for you. We will play with you. Will play you. We will play.

Four online characters appear together in the material world, offering to you a chance to play. They test the boundaries of the ‘Cyboptican’: an action office of computers and webcams. They attempt to invert the gaze that is inherent to their Labour.

The room is a set for the action to occur. The actions are instances of play. Buy an action and watch, be watched, watch together, or let us all be watched. (I see, you see, we see, they see). Choose a player and pay for their labour. Or choose a task and select who you would like to perform it.

Or you can perform for us.
Come to the environment to see how a parallel play develops…
Contribute to the play here: https://docs.google.com/document/d/14SvwQuqt_UhFqMpefbrnzHVNxAGH7gf_W7tMQeQqxh0/edit

Stephanie Ballantine (b. 1984, London) After detaching from the theatre and acting practice she was committed to throughout her childhood, Stephanie Ballantine studied Politics and Philosophy and University of Sheffield, UK. Upon finishing the degree she completed a foundation degree in Photography at Leeds College of Art and Design. She developed as an artist during this time as a way to express creatively; to construct visual forms that depict lines of academic thinking. She is an organiser and curator at FK-Gallerie and FK-Kollektiv she has also exhibited all over the world in solo and group exhibitions including; Aether, Sofia Bulgaria, Sydney museum of Contemporary Art, Sydney, Australia, Space Gallery at San Patricio Mall in Puerto Rico, Pantocrátor Gallery, Shanghai, China, NGBK, Berlin, Germany, ‘Crashpad’ KW Institute for Contemporary Art, Tate Liverpool, Liverpool

Lena Chen (b. 1987, San Francisco) is a writer and artist exploring identity, sexuality, and trauma. Based in Berlin, she organizes collaborative art projects to promote healing, empowerment, and civic engagement for people underrepresented in traditional media and politics. She has presented workshops, events, and performances in Germany, Ukraine, France, Denmark, Belgium, and the United States; Named a Progressive Women’s Voices fellow at the Women’s Media Center and a “new feminist leader” by More Magazine, Lena has spoken on women’s identity and sexuality at international conferences and universities such as SXSW, Yale, Brown, Stanford, and Oxford. She is the founder of The Athena Initiative, a creative support network for women in Berlin, and the co-founder of Feminist Pride Day (now part of the Feminist Majority Foundation’s campus programming).

Elly Clarke (b. 1976, London) As a performer, photographer and curator Elly Clarke is interested in the changing face, experience and role of the physical object and body in our increasingly digitally-mediated and experienced world. This she explores through photography (analogue & digital, mobile phone pictures & screen grabs) video, performance, audio, music, writing and curating. And through #Sergina, a gender-ambiguous, multi-locationable drag queen persona Clarke created, who sings and performs songs, across single and multiple bodies, about love, desire and loneliness in a time of digitalism.

HOUSE OF KILLING feat Esben Holk is a BFA graduate from the Bergen Academy of Art and Design 2017, with a background in creative coding, browserbased experiences and performative strategies. Concerned with the absence of ontological density in the material and notional existence of produced entities, such as the queer, he has been researching the agility of the proposed borders that define such objects. Vehemently anti-essentialist and anti-naturalist, the posthuman artist proactively approaches the sensation of being a lost entity as a weapon in a revolution. Almost like a selfcomforting mechanism, the works are desperate attempts to find meaning and reason with the constant displacement from certainty: an unsubstantiated self, in selfharming ways, trying to find substance.