Getting In Is The Easy Part:
Site-Specific Experience Design

The June 18th, 2013 installment of the Wanderlust School of Transgressive Placemkaing focused on creating unique experiences from the character of a place.
Speakers: Charlie Todd, Nick Fortugno and Jeff Stark (jump to bios)

For our third discussion of how to “re-imagine and re-make the far side of the no trespassing sign,” we brought together Jeff Stark, a site-specific theater and event producer, Nick Fortugno, a game designer, and Charlie Todd, the founder of Improv Everywhere, which stages improbable events in public places, often with large groups of volunteers.

Jeff, Nick, and Charlie agreed that staging slightly transgressive events is a way of reclaiming public space—and reminding the audience of their own role in any experience.

Here’s an overview of their approach to designing experiences, as well as their responses to questions about making rules, funding their events, and why subway cars are such an irresistible location. (You can also read their bios at the end.)

Jeff Stark: Building a Show by “Consuming Everything About a Space”

In preparing IRT: A Tragedy in Three Stations, a play about the beginning of the New York subway system that took place inside the subway, Jeff spent plenty of time in stations and stairwells. He looked for interesting features, like a bright mural on a wall, or a security booth with an easily visible screen inside that displays a feed from a security camera. http://www.subwaytheater.com/documentation/irt.html

“I just begin by looking, going into a space in a new way, when I really go and look as a scout I’m looking for the things that are unusual, the things that catch my eye…how could I repurpose them?”

That level of attention doesn’t stop after careful observation about the physical space. “I’m also trying to think about everything around what I’m looking at, going into the history of the subway system, reading about it,” he said. That’s how he discovered August Belmont, Jr., who founded and funded New York’s Interborough Transit Company—and who had his own personal subway car called the “Mineola.”

“I thought, that guy is such an asshole. What kind of person would own his own subway car? I decided to make a play around him.”

There’s a different kind of attention you have to bring in order to build a site-specific work, not just looking, but “consuming everything there is to know about a space, and translating it into a show or a work of art, he said. Jeff held casting calls for actors in the subway to understand how they would function in that actual environment.

“When we built the show finally, we had sort of thought about every possibility of theater within a subway. How can we transform a space: lighting, costume, sets, backdrops. We used all of these things to focus a story. The audience wasn’t sitting quietly in a dark room, with the performers in a pool of light. “This is 40 people crammed into a subway, meeting up in one station, and following the story up and down the stairs.”

That mural he had noticed became the backdrop of a dance scene, and the show’s costume designer made all the dresses in the scene to match the colors on the tiled walls.

The show ended with the audience crowded around that security booth, which allowed them to see a character in front of the security camera in another part of the station, creating a kind of “ghostly farewell.”

Just as painters sketch to keep their eye sharp, site-specific designers like to visit places that most people aren’t allowed to see. Going into these unusual, spectacular places is a way of focusing the eye—of looking at everything in an intense way.

Visiting one deserted building, Jeff thought it looked “sort of like an abandoned New York.” This provided the setting for an adaptation of “The Albertine Notes,” a short story by Rick Moody. http://www.flickr.com/photos/dont-front/sets/72157624026488424/ As in the subway, the space provides constraints and possibilities: “not having stairs you can climb up,” but also “looking at a room full of materials, and realizing, we don’t have to bring anything into the site, we can build with what’s there.” Even the lighting effects could be natural—for instance, relying on daylight, but throwing dust in the air to achieve a certain kind of filtered glow.

In thinking about experiences designed for particular settings Jeff uses installation artist Robert Irwin’s breakdown of four levels of “site specific” design. There is art that is:

  1. Site dominant (like monuments, statutes, and murals)
  2. Site adjusted (like a mural enlarged to fit a certain space)
  3. Site specific (like a sculpture or performance conceived with a site in mind, but not limited to that single space. The Night Heron speakeasy, he said, “could exist in many different water towers”)
  4. Site conditioned/determined (A work of art that draws its reasons for being from its particular surroundings, and that could not exist anywhere else. The process of making this kind of art must begin with an intimate hands-on reading of the site)

Questions:

How do you give people the right amount of instructions?

“I do really complex instructions via email, with repetition, telling people over and over again. Once we’re on site I have a rule: only give people three pieces of information. I think that three is good. ‘Make sure that you look where you’re stepping every single step.’ That’s a good rule. ‘Make sure you always stay with your buddy.’ Limit it to three.”

How do you get the money to put on these events? Are you charging for them?

“I’m really into charging money for stuff. I participate in culture—we all participate in culture—I think we should be paying for that. When we’re not paying for it, we’re participating in marketing. I charge what I think is a fair amount for my events, and I use that money to pay for my event. I try to always pay actors a very small amount, but I pay. Give people budgets to work with. There’s nothing sustainable in the realm of ‘Are we really paying ourselves what we’re worth? But we are definitely supporting the event and supporting the piece itself….When working with a big group of people one of the things that helps out wit the finances: use an open book policy. If there’s a $20 ticket, 5 percent is actors, 10 percent is sets, and it breaks down that way.”

What is it with subway cars?

“In the winter, the subway is one of the only protected warm spaces. You can’t work outside in abandoned spaces. The subway is relatively sheltered.”

Why does it matter that these events are transgressive?

“I like to trespass. I like to go places I’m not supposed to go, because those places are amazing, and I like to take people there. I like people to participate in risk, to invest in a project…As a new Yorker, I go to shows, go to see friends’ work, and so often my level of participation is reduced to buying a ticket. When I’m doing a more transgressive project…people become more alert, they become more aware of their surroundings…and they become more aware of their role in the creative action. In any creative act, it’s the audience that completes it.”

Nick Fortugno: Play as Exploration

One of Nick’s first interactive projects was “The Big Urban Game,” in which a group of people marched a three-story balloon through the city in three days. The size of the balloon forced a new relationship with urban design: what areas of the city could accommodate this enormous balloon? Where would it fit? “We were leaning on monumental structure, Goldberg’s idea that monumental structure is all about scale.”

Other projects: “Humanoid Asteroids,” a dance performance game that was a human version of the game Asteroids,” and “Ghost Engines in the Sky,” an “existential horror LARP,” or live-action role playing game, set on a train. He also created “A Measure for Marriage,” a Shakespeare-inspired game set in a rose garden created so that a friend could make a marriage proposal. http://www.electronicbookreview.com/thread/firstperson/gated

Each year, Nick’s one of the organizers of the yearly Come Out and Play Festival, a collection of site-specific games that’s happening this year on Governor’s Island and at South Street Seaport on July 13-14. http://www.comeoutandplay.org/

“The philosophy I use to design work in public,” Nick said, is “straight up: play a game in public.”

The goal is to give participants agency—to allow them to make their own choices, not just watch a linear narrative unfold. Play means: 1) Let users explore, but guide their explorations, 2) Make interactions simple, intuitive and reliable, and 3) design so every user has a unique experience.

Trying to design a player’s exploration is, obviously, tricky. One key to creating structure is making “rules, not scripts.” Rules tell your players what NOT to do, Nick suggests. Figuring out what they SHOULD do is what they contribute to the game.

That doesn’t mean a game designer is going to be completely surprised by the decisions the players make. In fact, the opposite is true: designers know that players will develop certain strategies, or find themselves confronted with certain objects. The challenge of creating a great game is building this structure into the experience, but allowing players to discover it themselves.

How does that work? One tactic is the “small ask.” If you want someone to do something, start off with something tiny, and get people to work with you. Don’t ask for a $1000 loan—start with a $1 loan. Once they are already on the path of helping you, you can ask them for more and more. (This is a principle of con tricks, as well as game design.) Dan Graham, for instance, designed a delayed action screen that looked like a mirror. It let people do whatever they did, and gave them a chance to notice the strangeness of that “mirror,” and become engaged with it—testing its limits, and trying to figure it out. Whatever you did, it “made something curious happen.”

“Giving people complex rules is very dangerous,” Nick said. When players get confused, “you get that weird look,” which means people have detached from the game, and the experience has failed. “The smaller you can make the ask,” the better, he said.

Another important tactic: flagging the path. “If you’re not going to tell people what to do, you need to give people signs.” In miniature golf, you can “see the flag for the next hole from where you’re standing…No one has to tell you where to go. You just see it.”

Disney theme parks are very good at this kind of way of guiding people without simply telling them what to do. In a Pirates of the Caribbean ride, he said, people want to have the feeling of steering their own ships—but they also don’t want to miss anything. So the ride includes flares of light ahead a key points–people don’t have to move their boat towards the flares, but they probably will.

“The body of a player is a very powerful tool that you can use,” Nick said. Haunted houses use very bright lights to eradicate participants’ night vision. This keeps them unsettled and peering, rather than adjusted to the dark. The bright lights flare up periodically in haunted houses, and so visitors’ night vision keeps getting disrupted.

In their climb to the Night Heron speakeasy, guests had to jump over a gap on their way to the water tower. It wasn’t a huge drop, Nick said, and there was plenty of help—but it was enough to get guests’ adrenaline running, and “ten minutes is not enough to get that out of your system. By the time you’re on the roof, you’re still nervous.” That nervous energy made the relief of entering the “safe space” of the speakeasy much stronger than it would have been otherwise, Nick said—even though you wouldn’t realize that consciously.

Smart phones create new possibilities for game design, Nick said. He’s interested in NFC tags, a small chip in a sticker or wristband that can transfer information to a mobile phone. But he said, “The most important thing about that technology is that it works every single time without fail. That’s much more important than it being cool or being what you want.”

He also talked about the difficulties of preparing for scale—both the enormous size of a one-time-use location, and the challenges of running a game for 200 people, neither of which you can really practice dealing with before hand. The only way to prepare, he said, is to train your non-player characters a lot, and “do these small-scale experiments. Make sure that the core of your experience can work. When I do public work, I always do that in public. It’s completely different when it’s in private.”

Questions:

How do you give people the right amount of instructions?

“Think from the top down, from most general and important,” to more specific details. Start with the most general rules, and add on the details. If they need to stand still, make it their job to stand still, and then add something more specific on top of that, “While standing still, you can whistle.” In general, do any complex instructions up front, rehearse everything, and don’t change anything on the day of the event.

How do you get the money to put on these events? Are you charging for them?

“I’m an idiot and I never charge for anything…My retirement will be vague memories of crazy stuff.”

What is it about the subway?

“It’s a claustrophobic box. It’s so small.” If you put thirty people inside a car, “There was no room for anyone to move.”

Why does it matter that these events are transgressive?

In the 2004 election, as Bush and Kerry toured the country, the campaigns created “free speech zones,” cordoned-off areas where citizens could protest. “I thought that was outrageous,” Nick said. “The whole country is a free speech zone…We have the right to assemble in public for public grievances. Every piece I’ve ever done, in the back of my head, is about assembly rights…a whole group of people, assembling in public, protesting assembly rights…the really transgressive notion that we have the right to do things in public, that the public space is ours.”

Charlie Todd: Cause Scenes

Improv Everywhere stages public pranks and happenings, often with large groups of volunteers who show up at a certain location and follow a simple rule or two to create surprising and delightful situations.

The famous no-pants subway ride started with a single hidden camera prank in 2002. (It’s worth watching the video http://improveverywhere.com/missions/the-no-pants-subway-ride .) Last year, 4000 people in 60 cities across 25 countries participated in a no pants subway day. “The intent is still the same: to give someone else a great experience in a place where they’re not expecting,” Charlie said.

Improv Everywhere has offered offshore gambling in central park (involving rented boats and games of blackjack), put a well-stocked bathroom attendant in a Times Square McDonald’s, and brought “Anton Chekhov” to give a reading at the Union Square Barnes and Nobles, complete with posters all over the store.

Sometimes it’s a specific location that inspires an event—like an odd, four-foot-tall stone ledge that Charlie saw on a building near Madison Square Garden. (It became the site for a “suicide jumper” poised three feet above the sidewalk, with a series of people who dramatically tried to talk him down.) http://improveverywhere.com/2013/02/27/suicide-jumper-2/

Another time in Union Square, Charlie saw a girl dancing in the window of Forever 21. It was night, and she was backlit, and the moment was weirdly dramatic—but it only lasted ten seconds, and then her friend gave her a hug and they walked away. The moment revealed the whole glass building—which also housed a Filene’s Basement and a DSW—as a series of glowing stages. “I saw that and I decided the logical next step was to have someone in every single window,” Charlie said.

Coordinating that dance—across “three different retail stores” – took a lot of research, in terms of visiting the space, thinking about what participants could get away with, and “what the sensitive places might be.”

The final event, in 2005, involved coordinated jumping jacks, and some solo dancers, and “We ended up having a very real audience, people getting on the subway who stopped and ended up giving us a round of applause,” Charlie said. (The stores reacted differently: Filene’s Basement didn’t seem to notice anything happening; DSW “had a meltdown and physically removed our participants.”)

While Improv Everywhere is linked to the term “flash mob,” Charlie said he that he hates that term. “We pre-date it,” he said. “To me, it’s never about getting a mob of people to do something, it’s about getting the right number of people to do something.”

Just six people and five pieces of paper can have a huge effect on a large number of people. For one event, Charlie identified a particularly grim subway station that always had a long line of people waiting for the elevators. How could that routine, frustrating experience be transformed? At 8:30 am, on a winter morning in 2009, a small group of people staged themselves on the stairs parallel to the escalator with paper signs: “ROB WANTS TO GIVE YOU A HIGH FIVE. GET READY.” And at the end there was “ROB,” identified by a sign, giving high fives to every person on the escalator. “Rob gave out about 299 high fives over the course of 40 minutes,” Charlie said, and the people on the opposite escalator, who weren’t getting any attention, looked jealous. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Abt8aAB-Dr0

Improv Everywhere’s volunteers are contacted through a mailing list (you can join for global events, or New York specific events) and sometimes great ideas come from volunteers themselves—like a high school kid in Texas who emailed in a great idea for an event.

Questions:

How do you give people the right amount of instructions?

Make it as simple as possible: one thing, or two things, like, “Go into Grand Central, freeze in place. Or “Ride the train, take your pants off.”

How do you get the money to put on these events? Are you charging for them?

Events are “Free of charge to participate…my participants are my actors. Even though it’s an enjoyable experience, they’re helping me create something. I don’t have a traditional audience….the audience is the actors.” Improv Everywhere’s popular YouTube channel is part of the YouTube partners program, and the “annoying preroll ads that drive you crazy” provides “enough money that it helps me cover the cost of the projects.”

What is it with subway cars?

“It’s such a great captive audience. You audience can’t leave you. If you’re doing something in a park or other public space people can ignore you. It’s not confrontation. If you don’t want to participate, you can sit and read your iPhone. If you do want to participate, it’s there right in front of you.” There’s also “good turnover,” with new audience members walking into the experience every minute or so and “reacting to it for the first time.”

Why does it matter that these events are transgressive?

“We as citizens should have the right to express ourselves creatively in a public space, and we should not have to go through a permit process….Don’t wait for someone…even a Kickstarter. Don’t you can raise the money: go do it. Creating on your own terms without asking for permission is transgressive.”

Jeff Stark is the editor of Nonsense NYC, a weekly email list and discriminating resource for independent art, weird events, strange happenings, unique parties, and senseless culture in New York City. He was a member of the Miss Rockaway Armada, a collective art project that floated a junk raft down the Mississippi River in 2006. He wrote and directed "IRT: A Tragedy in Three Stations," a site-specific theater piece that took place on the New York City Subway. In 2010 he directed the Sweet Cheat, a science-fiction theatrical trespass based on the Albertine Notes by Rick Moody

Nick Fortugno has been a designer, writer and project manager on dozens of commercial and serious games, serving as lead designer on the downloadable blockbuster Diner Dash and the award-winning serious game Ayiti: The Cost of Life. Nick is a co-founder of the Come Out and Play street games festival hosted in NYC and around the world since 2006. Nick teaches game design and interactive narrative design at Parsons The New School of Design, and helped develop the school’s game design curriculum.

Charlie Todd is the founder of Improv Everywhere, producing, directing, performing, and documenting the group’s work for over twelve years. He is also a performer at the Upright Citizens Brigade Theatre in New York City. Charlie is the author of Causing a Scene, a book about Improv Everywhere published by Harper Collins.

About the Speakers:

Charlie Todd is the founder of Improv Everywhere, producing, directing, performing, and documenting the group’s work for over twelve years. He is also a performer at the Upright Citizens Brigade Theatre in New York City. Charlie is the author of Causing a Scene, a book about Improv Everywhere published by Harper Collins.

Nick Fortugno has been a designer, writer and project manager on dozens of commercial and serious games, serving as lead designer on the downloadable blockbuster Diner Dash and the award-winning serious game Ayiti: The Cost of Life. Nick is a co-founder of the Come Out and Play street games festival hosted in NYC and around the world since 2006. Nick teaches game design and interactive narrative design at Parsons The New School of Design, and helped develop the school’s game design curriculum.

Jeff Stark is the editor of Nonsense NYC, a weekly email list and discriminating resource for independent art, weird events, strange happenings, unique parties, and senseless culture in New York City. He was a member of the Miss Rockaway Armada, a collective art project that floated a junk raft down the Mississippi River in 2006. He wrote and directed "IRT: A Tragedy in Three Stations," a site-specific theater piece that took place on the New York City Subway. In 2010 he directed the Sweet Cheat, a science-fiction theatrical trespass based on the Albertine Notes by Rick Moody.