Open Culture

Within the Open Culture intervention we invite audiences to create their vision of the future of Guimarães. Give Me Back My Broken Night is a mobile performance work using pervasive technology, which asks audiences to collaboratively imagine the future of their city. Site-specific science fictions are told using a combination of location sensitivemobile devices, portable projectors and actors, to create a magical, relevant and cinematic experience for participants.

Unlike conventional guided tours or historic walks, this is a guided tour of the future of
Guimarães. Audiences are given a mobile device and a blank folded paper map, a micro projector is hung around their neck. In the streets, an actor guides them through a landscape of utopian or dystopian possibilites. They ask the participants about what they would like to see there. As the audience describe their own visions of the future, these imagined buildings begin to appear on the map in their hand as a series of glowing lines.

Open City, in partnership with the British Council commissioned theatre performance artists
Uninvited Guests and Circumstance to deliver the shows in October in Guimarães.

About the artists
Formed in Bristol in 1998, Uninvited Guests make entertaining and provocative performance. Their work represents a contemporary reality, in which memories of movies are as much part of our experience as intimate dialogues with lovers. They work in various contexts and constellations, focusing mainly on performance but also producing installation and digital media. Recent work has blurred the line between theatre and social festivities, with audiences joining them in events that are celebratory and elegiac, nostalgic and critical of these times. Previous projects include Guest House, Film, Offline, Live Chat, Schlock, Aftermath, It Is Like It Ought To Be: A Pastoral, Love Letters Straight From Your Heart and Make Better Please.

Uninvited Guests’ work has toured nationally and internationally, showing in the UK, China, Germany, Spain, Switzerland, Slovenia, Austria and Australia.
Uninvited Guests are produced by Fuel. www.fueltheatre.com

Paul Clarke is one of the artistic directors of Uninvited Guests and a member of the Performance Re-enactment Society. He is also a Lecturer in Performance at University of Bristol.

Duncan Speakman works with circumstance, an international collective of artists, who create cinematic experiences in unexpected locations. These experiences take many forms, from mass participation performances and intimate in-ear stories, to books, installations and workshops. Using both emergent and commonplace technology, they make films without cameras, creating alternate worlds and poetic layers in the everyday.

circumstance draws on its members’ backgrounds in contemporary performance, theatre, interactive design, music composition, wearable electronics, locative and pervasive media. They are known for the creation of the ‘subtlemob’ form of performance and the application of mobile electronics in public space performances. Projects consistently address the social, political and emotional impacts of the technologies used.

From 2008-2010 Duncan was resident at the Pervasive Media Studio in Bristol (UK). His work has been exhibited and performed internationally at venues and festivals including RAM (JP), ISEA(JP), MediaCity(KR), M:ST(CA), SemiPermanent(NZ), PerformanceSpace(AUS), SonicActs(NE), AlmostCinema(BE), Mayfest(UK).

The technology development of the piece has been delivered by iShed and Calvium.

A project in partnership with The British Council.