In this section I want to further explore the idea that the interactive immersive imaginary illuminates both the agency of participants in assembling space-time and their lack of control over assemblages that proceed in unpredictable ways. I will show
how the real-reel assemblages that pop-up cinemas create are shown to be nonlinear; that is to say, the outcomes of interactions within it are not necessarily predictable from the actions themselves.
The unpredictable outcomes of interaction within immersive spaces are evident in the spatiotemporal architectures of i-Docs. As Ash has argued, a primary requirement of interactive interfaces is that contingency be visible (Ash, 2010, 662) so that users are made aware of the choices available. These contingencies, as discussed in the methodology chapter, are signalled by ‘attractors’ (Wood, 2007); elements of the interface that invite users to interact in experimental ways. Crucially, users don’t always know what impact their interactions will have. Users interacting with my i-Doc, for example, will quickly discover that they can activate a clip by clicking on an icon, and can leave it again by clicking back on the map. However, I left the consequences of these interactions somewhat unclear. While some instructions are given on the homepage, many potential questions are left unanswered; will users be able to see a clip again if they leave it? If they choose an option at the end of a clip such as ‘follow the river’ where will this take them? And what other routes through the material might it preclude? Furthermore, the i-Doc might have attractors signalling some of its capacities, but others are not made clear. For example, an impatient user could spend a long time within the i-Doc and never notice the ‘outside pop-up city’ pages if they never watch a clip through to its ending;
given that these pages are not located in the map, or mentioned in the instructions, and are accessible only by links when the clip finishes. Or, a user who didn’t use notice the map’s zoom button might spend the their whole time in the i-Doc zoomed in to a point where they missed clips happening further out in London, such as in Brentford or Barking. These design features were intended to produce a constant tension when, interacting with the i-Doc, between agency and uncertainty. Users never know entirely what the consequences of their actions are or what possibilities their current actions are precluding.
Creating these tensions between agency and uncertainty in the i-Doc enabled me to articulate the logic of interactive immersive pop-up cinema events too. At Secret Cinema’s events, spectators are forced to make ongoing choices for which the outcomes are unpredictable and which preclude other adventures. For example, during Miller’s Crossing myself and the friend I was attending with (Mike), encountered an actor who sent us to ‘the police station’ to try and find some paper
work he wanted to use in a bribe. When we arrived at the police station another character was in the process of gathering participants to go on a raid of one of the site’s clubs; to find people skirting prohibition laws. Mike and I had to decide whether to follow this new mission or to complete the task set by the previous character. We didn’t know what would happen if we followed the raid team, or what we would miss by not further exploring our mission in the police station.
Adrian Miles argues that interactivity in i-Docs revolves around both agency and uncertainty (Miles, 2014). Kate Nash has also argued that the user experience is typified not just by choice but by confusion and hesitation (Nash, 2014). Discussing user experiences of the i-Doc Bear 71, Nash argues that users don’t always understand the choices on offer to them or how they are meant to interact with the interface and this causes anxiety that they are doing something ‘wrong’ and missing
parts of the i-Doc. Nash draws attention to how users are made aware not just of their potentials to affect the i-Doc, as part of its assemblage, but of their limited perspective within it; the fact that they are entangled in processes that extend beyond their perceptual capacities despite being impacted by their actions. As in the immersive installation art Hawkins discusses, users are denied a ‘birds eye view’ (Hawkins, 2010, p. 327) and therefore must act without full knowledge of the consequences of their actions. To read this through Jameson’s interpretation of the mirror stage and its imaginary, we could say that interactive-immersive pop-up events make the subject aware of their ‘inner motoricity’; the bodily capacities they have to act, but also of their lack of control over the world of ‘bodies and forms’ within
This tension between agency and uncertainty was particularly clear in Secret Cinema’s screening of Miller’s Crossing (Coen & Coen, 1990). Miller’s Crossing is a film in which chance and uncertainty are primary themes. The film opens with a conversation between two mob bosses, Leo and Johnny Caspar, about fixing boxing fights. Johnny complains that ‘It’s getting so a business man can’t expect no return from a fixed fight. Now if you can’t trust a fix, what can you trust?” This conversation
sets up a theme of uncertainty reiterated across the film, largely through a motif of Tom placing and losing bets. Caspar’s failed fixes are emblematic of the pervasive mood of uncertainty in Miller’s Crossing, of a world where even that which is ‘fixed’,
supposedly made certain by those most powerful, is liable to have unpredictable outcomes. This theme of uncertainty was made central to Secret Cinema’s staging of Miller’s Crossing. As mentioned, when I entered the site I was given $500 by the Mayor, this money could be used to pay my way into bars, do business deals with actors and other characters and to place bets. For example, towards the end of the evening actors began encouraging us to place bets on a boxing fight that was going to take place in the courtyard. The ability to invest and bet was anxiety inducing because it had real implications for how you were able to navigate the space. For example, having given hundreds of dollars to an ‘attorney’, I was later unable to pay my way into a bar where I’d agreed to meet Mike. My in-character exchange had caused an unpredictable outcome, not only limiting my interactive capacities within the in fiction world, but separating me from my friend for the best part of the evening.
If the heightened sense of spatiotemporal agency noted in the previous part of this section can be linked to pop-up’s encouragement of citizens to be creators of space- time, then here we see that the flip side of this is uncertainty; that our actions have consequences beyond our control. This experience of uncertainty recalls Butler’s ontological definition of precarity. For Butler, we are all precarious because of our dependence on others, whose actions we can’t predict (Butler, 2009). Here, though, rather than feature as precarity, uncertainty becomes part of the game of pop-up cinema. Spectators at Secret Cinema attend precisely because they want uncertainty, the enjoyment stems from being part of an immersive fictional world
where your actions have unpredictable outcomes and events take unpredictable courses. At a time of increased urban precarity, the attention to uncertainty that such events foreground can be seen as a way to make sense of a more pervasive condition of uncertainty and turn it into a sought after, pleasurable experience. Uncertainty, rather than being experienced negatively in relation to precarity, becomes part of pop-up’s positive nonlinear imaginary; figured as exciting
unpredictability.