Assistant Professors of Emerging Media Arts Ash Eliza Smith and Robert Twomey will have their work, “CLEANING THE STABLES” included in the La Jolla Playhouse Without Walls (WOW) Festival on April 27 in San Diego.
“CLEANING THE STABLES” is part of the Herakles Project by the INKubator Collective and features story and narrative system design by Smith and Twomey. Sam Bendix (BFA 2021) is a producer and visual designer. Lincoln Graham is also a producer. Additional production support comes from student artists at the Johnny Carson Center for Emerging Media Arts.
“CLEANING THE STABLES” is a participatory sound walk meets locative cinema experience. Herakles’ fifth labor, redirecting two rivers to flush the stables, echoes on as a bizarre cult legend. In headphones, participants will explore a speculative future of geoengineering and management systems gone wrong.
“We work in a space where elements of gaming, liveness, performance and generative AI technology come together,” Smith said. “In this piece, we are thinking about that in terms of location-based cinema or how spatially your GPS and what you say back to the system affects the narrative—you have the agency to affect the outcome of the play, and that is what we bring in from gaming or live-action role play.”
The WOW Festival is one of the most significant performing arts festivals in the United States to focus on work that takes place outside of traditional theatrical venues.
For more information on “Cleaning the Stables,” visit https://go.unl.edu/mzhr.