fic.the.sky

fic.the.sky is a four-hour “performance hangout” entwining music, choreography, role-play and sculpture, and inspired by fandom and open-source culture. Staged at Fierce Festival in Birmingham, and simultaneously live-streamed via The New Inquiry ("twitter takeover"), it enables audiences to come and go, lurk and hangout. Performance is a mode of fictioning here, of altered duration, and of “being together”; where fantasy, the reworking of popular myths and images, and the invention of new folk narratives are made possible. Fiction (or rather live fictioning) is potential: a nonproductive force through which we might envision a life beyond “work versus leisure” (Georges Bataille) or the consequent blurring of these paradigms, including the subsuming of play and participation into the neoliberal organizational agenda. fic.the.sky wants you to want to click or participate more than actually do so. This is a time of conjuring. The title is thus an imperative—a kind of Fluxus instruction for the computer age. When salvaged JPEGs of cutesy cats and fascist memes become monuments of digital democracy, fiction offers an alternative: a possible future glimpsed in the erotic tension between work and play, the utopic but always unobtainable sky and ourselves. So “hang out” for as long as you want or just open a separate tab while you get on with other business