Skinship

Skinship run at Aoyama Gakuin University in Tokyo November, 2019 as a part of the art exhibition "The Shape of Things to Come". In it's original form, players play in a room of objects, to explore, some of which are soft robots (designed with Jonas Jorgensen, professor at the University of Southern Denmark's Biorobotics department). The script here is a modified version designed after the covid pandemic made playing in its original format difficult.

Skinship

Susan Ploetz

Mini-larp script for TI: touching intelligence

Introduction

Welcome, introduction round of names/pronouns. I will introduce myself and my practice.

Structure of event:

• Introduction
• Warming up and workshop
• LARP runtime
• Debrief

Altogether we will take about 1.5/2 hours, however both the workshop and the LARP runtime could be made longer—this is up to the participants and facilitator. Debrief can take ten minutes or longer.

The setting

This world is alien to you, this world in this room. You may have been to Earth before, so you might have had other experiences on this planet, but the objects in this room are completely new. All of you have been sent here to investigate from another place. Your culture has a group consciousness and you have a distributed intelligence. You have been split up physically, but you still share information and have a group sense of meaning-making. Together you consolidate the information you have been gathering. The main method of investigating is through your senses, the most powerful being touch. Touch is how you ground all your other senses, give them foundation, and combine them to create a more complex understanding of your surroundings. Your mission is to explore what is before you and gather information—especially if you think there is intelligence here, and/or any special powers to redeem. You will also share information about how to relate with these beings/things. You will report back to the members of your group through words, which become a kind of chant, poem, or narrative matrix cloud. The words help others to understand what you are encountering. You combine all of your experiences together to create communal sense and sensing, and a generalized sense of this place.

You are sensory beings, primarily; the senses occupy most of your activities and awareness. Because you are so sensory, your language is composed of mostly words that describe qualities. The words act as matrices that hold the qualities of things, and the sensory qualities of materials and objects. These qualities are what you recognize as the object’s powers, perhaps their intelligence. Your words are also the medium through which you experiment with communicating with the things and materials around you: Will they respond in some way, in any way you can decipher or recognize? What will they say to you? And how will they do so?

We will play sensing creatures that detect intelligence/power through touch. In the workshop, we will make a simple character for ourselves, this is who we will play/embody during the LARP runtime. We will do some centering/sensory practices as a warm-up to train them to be able to sense intelligence through all of the senses (especially touch) as these sort-of alien beings. The workshop phase will give you the tools you need to play. You can ask questions during the workshop phase. If you are not quite clear on what to do, please bring it up! This is an experiment, no one here has done something quite like this before. So, relax, and invite a sense of play and exploration. There isn’t a right way or wrong way to do this. If you feel lost, just follow what others are doing, and we’ll arrive at a good place together, or take a break for a minute and then come back into the play. Breaks are super important to absorb what is happening, to listen to your fellow players, and to follow your perceptions! If you need to leave the experience/zoom call entirely (no explanation needed!), please just let me know in the chat box with a private message, so I know not to wait for you. We will take a short break at the end, and you can use this to go to the bathroom, get some water, etc. You can also jot down things about the experience you’d like to remember. After this we will debrief, which gives us a bit of time after the LARP play to share our experiences and observations. This part is totally voluntary as well.

I am happy to see you all in this part of the workshop. When we do the sensory warm-ups, you can turn your video off if that makes you more comfortable to move or explore. We can keep the cameras off for most of the workshop and LARP, but I would love to have them all on for the debrief. I will simply ask you to turn them on if necessary.

Workshopping

Making the characters: Driving questions and motivations

First, we will “make” our characters. You can use the workshop to get a feel for how to carry out the activities as your character might.You can experiment with different approaches.

Invite a sense of your character’s physicality in.

Whatever your being is, they have at least two limbs for sensing and touching, with the ends of the limbs being particularly sensitive and agile for this task. But there are other limbs and surfaces, too! (Note: it’s best that you don’t imagine your body too different from the one you have now, as it is a physical experience and we will be situated in our bodies). As you tune in and explore, invite yourself to be curious about what comes up.

What do you believe about sentience? Do you believe animals, plants, objects, materials can be sentient? Does your character have the same beliefs, or something different? Which sense/senses would you like to explore the most today? Touch is the most powerful sense for your people, but your character has an additional special sense in addition to this. See if that special sense comes to you now, or at any time in the workshop (or perhaps it only shows up during play!). How do you feel about touch/touching? How does your character feel different about touch/touching? Has your character been to Earth before, and if so for how long? How well do they feel they know this planet? Invite a sense of your character’s name, and enter it into the name field. We won’t be calling each other by names in this experience, but it will help to remind us that we are not our normal selves, but playing a different being.

Somatic warm-ups: Awakening the senses

In this warm-up, we will open up our senses and perceptions and start practicing how our character perceives, relates to, and takes in what is around them. In the room, I invite you to take it all in. Any part or surface in the room, from top to bottom. Take your time with each sense, and use breath and pauses to absorb the information you are gathering.

Touch the different materials and they also touch you. Explore this sensation, temperature, texture, weight. Explore the layers of what you touch, notice the qualities. There may be a vibration, a smell. Observe its texture, weight, movement, etc. Use all the senses, but remember that touch is especially important and strong for these beings. It’s where they combine most information; it surpasses all the other senses. Movement touching: How can you move the material, how does it move through space, by itself? Invite the materials into your quality of movement. Invite a sense of becoming this material through touch. Smell/taste/molecule touching: Chemical information, micro-information. What do you notice, how does it affect you? Sound touching: What sounds does it make, what sounds do you make together? Sight touching: How do the materials touch your sense of sight? What information do you gather through vision? Start to sound out loud the information you are sensing/gathering. You can use words of any language that feels right to you. Focus on the quality of what you are touching.

Take in and notice the objects that have been gathered here for today’s exploration. Are there any objects that your character is most drawn to? Are there any they are repulsed by? Or are they simply curious? We as beings are innately curious about anything that comes to us via the senses, but notice anything you might want to play on, as a character.

Group warm-up: Get synchronized as a group and find our voices in space again

We count from one to ten, with a different person saying each number out loud (can repeat numbers with less than ten people, but don’t say numbers in a row, wait a few numbers until you speak again). We close our eyes, take a breath in and out together, and one person says “one.” Feel into the time and space. Someone else says the next number. Do this until you get to ten (try in different ways, perhaps slower).

Rehearsing LARPplay

We come to the first object (which in this case is a phone – something everyone has). We take it in, put our hands on it (if you are doing this in a room with someone else, you can both put your hands on it, or pass the same object back and forth), hold it in our hands, bring our nose towards it, hold it to our ears. We explore all the qualities of this object with all our senses. As we do this, we take note of what we observe of these qualities, of the materials, of the object. These qualities hold the consciousness and intelligence of these materials. This is what we notice, this is how we find out the intelligence of what is around us. When one person names a quality out loud, we all repeat it, over and over again, experimenting with volume. We make a poem from the qualities named. Try to remember what everyone has been saying, repeat a word if you think it is an especially strong quality/power of this object.

LARP play is:

• Encounter object.
• Sense object as group: Observe others sensing, one names the qualities out loud, and others in the group repeat the word after. You can say the words in any language that comes to you, especially if your native language isn’t English. Experiment with sounds, types of words (adjectives, nouns).
• We continue noticing, wording, repeating what others say. Feel free to repeat a word that someone else has said if it seems to be an especially powerful aspect of this object.
• Once you feel you have gathered enough data on this object, you can come to rest. This will be a period of time of extended silence. As a group we will find this place together.
• Pause to download the data on this object.
• We will repeat the same process for each object. When we have done this for every object, we will sit in silence for a bit longer. I will signal when the experience is over.

I will guide you through the first object and if necessary I can initiate the other objects, but whoever wants to start with the next object, after a pause, is welcome to do so. Again, we will get a feel for how to do this together!

You can sit, lay, stand, or move around, as long as we all can hear you still.

Any questions?

I will start the LARP with a guided meditation to get you back into your character, and after we have explored the last object together, I will do a short guided meditation to bring you back to your “normal” player self, and back into the room. We will take a small five-minute break and then debrief. Feel free to write things you observed down before we gather again together for the debrief.

Runtime

Here, a guided meditation to get back into character. You can give sound and lighting cues for start and end times, or just guide people with your words. Start taking in the room around you as your character might.

• Encounter object.
• Sensing object, sensing qualities, finding words for the qualities, sharing the words, repeating the words of others. Continue until there is an extended period of stillness.
• Move onto next object.
• Do this for however many objects you want, for as long as you want.

End play in your designated way (maybe you play a sound, turn off the lights, gently end it with your words). Guide people out of their character, and out of the LARP experience. Imagine putting this character to your side, or walking out of the character and standing in front of them, and slowly backing away. Realign yourself with the room, with more of your daily “self.” Open your eyes...

Five minute break to stretch, get water, go to the toilet, etc.

Debrief: Rundas (Rounds)

I often invite participants to write things down at first, which gives them a moment to be with themselves and their own experience before opening up to the group’s perceptions. Writing, drawing, and other responses are all great methods to try. Try this first before opening up to a group debrief and conversation.

The focus right now is on sharing your experience. You are welcome to pass if you don’t want to share. You can go in a circle or go randomly. The idea is to give each person space to share without responding to what they said. After some rounds like this, you could open it up to a back-and-forth conversation.

1. How do you feel now, in one-three words, or one-two sentences.
2. What did you notice/observe?
3. Any moments you want to share?
4. What worked well for you? What do you wish had been different?

Find other ways to digest/absorb: physical connection, walking, napping, staying with the experience for a bit, or putting it down and doing something completely different!
Be open to whatever observations, information, insights might arise over the next few days!

Susan Ploetz is an artist-researcher working with somatics, theory, writing, performance, simulation and live action role plays (larping) in different configurations.