Kristen | The Film Stage

The Great Park City Heist

When most people think of the Sundance Film Festival, they think of film screenings and premieres. What they might not know about is a cool part of the fest called New Frontier, previously on Main Street, but will be on Park Ave for 2011. The festival describes this section as, “An experiment in Festival presentation, New Frontier is a social and creative space that showcases media installations, multimedia performances, transmedia experiences, panel discussions, and more.”

One New Frontier group that I’m really excited to check out is Blast Theory, a Brighton-based group, who have spent the last decade working in the field of mobile experiences.  Their project is called A Machine to See With, in which Festivalgoers will  get the chance to enter into an alternative reality where you experience the scene of a robbery as they walk the streets of Park City with their cell phones. Here is an part of an interview in which group member Matt Adams describes the project:

Can you describe A Machine to See With, the project you’re bringing to the 2011 Sundance Film Festival?

Adams: It’s a work where you book a screening, which starts every 15 minutes, and you hand over your cell phone number. On the day of the screening you get a call telling you where to be and at what time. At that  given time your phone rings and a voice begins to talk to you. The voice guides you around the city as you explore various places and undertake a number of tasks. You do these quiet kinds of challenging things as you’re talked through a real-life heist movie which is focused around the robbery of a bank. We build up to this robbery, and then you deal with the aftermath of that robbery as the climax of the work.

Is the “screening” developed for any city, or is it specific to Park City?

Adams: It’s going to be mostly tailor-made for Park City. We’ve presented the work once in San Jose, and our original conception for the work was that it could be played in any city quite easily. But as we got closer to the work we found so many great things about making it very tailored to a specific location. Clearly San Jose in September is a very different proposition than Park City in January.

How do you imagine the contrast between this individual “isolated” experience and the bustle of the “communal” Festival experience to play out?

Adams:  I think it will work brilliantly. The project is predicated on the idea that when you see someone walking on the street with a cell phone pressed to their ear, it’s just another member of the public going about their regular day. We’ve emphasized that you’re doing this secret mission and it’s quite a high adrenaline experience. You walk around the street feeling like you’re doing things that you really shouldn’t be doing, and the fact that the people around you are oblivious is a big part of the thrill.

 All of your projects have a playful fun factor to them, but they also provoke serious thought about our current social and political worlds. What’s the importance of that dynamic in your work?

Adams: We try to make work that is very open and engaging. Cinema has this enormous breadth and openness in terms of how it draws you in, but then these deep and complex experiences can be had within that. The title of [A Machine to See With] comes from a Godard film, but it’s also a reference to the fact that this whole work is experienced by automated phone calls. The work in some ways is a comment on the way in which computers attempt to give us personal experiences through highly automated sets of procedures. The work has a fascination with how machines structure our experiences.