It felt a little weird to begin working on an installation having only read half of the script of The Nether, so I went ahead and read the whole play before meeting up with my group. I didn’t know if it would cause any kind of disconnect among us, having read different amounts of the play… but when we got together for our first group meeting, we’d all made the same choice! It felt like a good signal of how well we would mesh as a team.
As most of my ITP projects tend to go, we started with some pretty grand designs. We were going to design and build a working “terminal” - A coffin shaped and sized cardboard/wood structure that would serve as the entrance to our room. As soon as we started to plan that version of the piece out, we realized it wasn’t feasible. With only a week and no access to our performance space until the day of, we were going to have to come up with something less concrete and easier to construct quickly. Instead of a terminal, we decided to focus on the sign up process. What would the owners of the Nether require of a user to sign up? Was this log in process taking place before or after the investigations of the play begin? We decided that this login took place after the events of the play, and so after collecting standard account info (name, age, etc) we added biometrics and a long document of terms and conditions so that, should any of our new users attempt to conduct illegal business in the nether, we would have an easier time tracking and punishing them. *
When the time came to perform, I was pretty nervous, embarrassed, and uncomfortable. I did a lot of theater in high school and undergrad, so I’m usually very comfortable performing; but I’m used to working off of someone else’s script, so there’s sort of a comfort in knowing that the structure and words are good- I can be objective about other people’s writing in a way that I can’t with my own. When performing something I’m responsible for writing (or ¼ responsible for writing!) the stakes are much higher, and the level of embarrassment was much more palpable.
However, at the tail end, when I heard Kate leave the room and say, “wow that was super unsettling!” I felt I could relax. We’d done what we set out to do.
*The terms and conditions were stolen from apple, but we modified each section so that if you actually did read them, you’d see we were also claiming rights to your soul and all your property, should the need arise.