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16 October 2006

I spend all day at home trying to catch up with some urgent work. Nick Kaye reports back from his trip to Spain that marks the beginning of the Presenccia project for which we have recently employed an RA in Barcelona. We discuss practicalities, research priorities and imminent deadlines. This is an amazing project and a real challenge not only for us, but also, I think, for our discipline. While we talk, I look at the garden in which I spent so little time this Summer. The phone buzzes. I arrive at the hospital. There is no one here. I wish I could stop time.

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I find that I meet fewer and fewer players in the game. Yesterday’s company was an exception. I spend an increasing amount of time just meandering between destinations, with nothing to do, no one to meet, no missions to fulfil. I arrive at the Locarno which, allegedly, is packed with heaving bodies. However, ANGRY JOE is the only one who is here. There are many drum kits, though I can see no evidence of players’ activity. I look for HASSAN but he is not here. I wish that I was in Berlin so I could have a peak at the destinations’ table to find out how many players are still in the game. I spend the rest of the day writing up some sections of a bid, hopefully involving further work with Mixed Reality Lab. I find the writing exciting, and am particularly keen to develop some new ways of analysing this kind of performance. However entertaining or extravagant this blog may be, it is profoundly limiting in terms of what it can show of the game. I have a lot to learn.

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In the evening, I pack up my equipment again, and arrive at the Battle of Trafalgar Square. The doors are now locked. There is a lot of silence all round me. I look at past days’ entries on the game and am reminded of Forced Entertainment. I feel that in many ways I am inspired by their work in this blog. First, I use found images, in the sense that I collect images of where I find myself when I check my phone. Although I write intertextually, it is the images of where I am, in conjunction with what happens to me in the game, that determine, day after day, what I write about. That is to say, that today, for instance, I have no idea of what I’ll be writing about tomorrow. Forced Entertainment’s work is generally task oriented. I too, every day, have a task to fulfil and, unquestionably, my game is influenced by the fact that I have to do this task. Not only, but the way I play and write about my play is inevitably informed by the repetitiveness of my actions. At the beginning of this game, everything was new – the players, the destinations, the food, the objects. Likewise, my actions as a documenter of the game were new. Now, my actions feel tired. The writing is collapsing. I often think that I should give it up. Writing in this way is time consuming and exhausting, even in normal circumstances. But, I know, I must carry on.

I have said before that I have never written publicly in this way about art. I feel that I should say that it is not my desire to interpret the piece critically here. This is not an academic study. Neither is it a performance. I do not wish to synthesise the various strands that form this 24 day-long text. Instead, I juxtapose one story against another. I aim for a collage. But my dialectical tactic has no resolution. This, of course, is deliberate. I use overlapping, often repetitive dramaturgies. Some may be more interesting than others. Some may be more explicit. Some may be more hidden. One is almost imperceptible, except, perhaps to one reader. All of them, of course, have to do with the game or my life or both. The question, then, is, what is the relationship between this documentation and my game? What comes first? What follows what? And where is my life in this?

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Later in the day, I tidy everything up and arrive at Chefwok which is shut now. I look at my daughter’s drawing and feel guilty about leaving her again so soon after getting back from Hamburg. I decide to go back to the Locarno where I find MARTIN, who is silent, as usual. I have much to do in the morning. Another train to catch. As I pack some notes from our last meeting, I remind myself that this time I should not drink coffee in Steve Benford’s office.

For my game tomorrow see Day of the Figurines 17/10/2006

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