Place Storming v. 3.0 : an open source, no rights reserved, networking adventure

Jane McGonigal (University of California @ Berkeley, 42 Entertainment)

Place storm: v.

1. to enter and occupy a site with the intention of staging a benevolent intervention

2. to brainstorm new rule sets or social tools for a shared or public space

This workshop is a play-based exploration of the intersections among performance studies, pervasive gaming and digital network counterculture. We will draw inspiration from the open source ethic, peer to peer (P2P) software, big urban games, hacker standards, the creative commons, public domain politics, copyleft culture, meme theory and the locative media movement. High-tech, low-tech and no-tech performance researchers are welcome and encouraged to participate!

Place Storming begins with a series of quickfire collaborative games addressing a range of digital counterculture topics. These games will generate the “source code” for our networking adventure. Then, as a group, we will go mobile with our source code: We will “place storm” public, shared and transitional spaces in and around the conference site. In these spaces, we will improvise, script, perform, document and/or embed collective, site-specific hacks. The purpose of these hacks: to insert our own research and performance rule sets into the public domain of Providence.

As Place Stormers, our mission is:

• To identify the “fourth wall” of performance studies research, and break it
• To make performance research a more pervasive and public practice
• To introduce the “intellectual property” (IP) of performance studies into the creative commons
• To create viral performance studies memes
• To cite each others' work in a more site-specific manner

Participants are encouraged to bring to the workshop one or more pieces of their own performance research (e.g., a PSi abstract, a working title, the first page of a paper draft, an artist's statement) to contribute to the pool of “source code” for our adventure. Also, any and all personal mobile media and network technologies (cell phones, digital cameras, PDAs, wi-fi enabled laptops, MP3 players, GPS devices, etc.) are welcome and encouraged — we will be building our pervasive performance network out of whatever we have on hand.

At the end of the workshop, all participants will receive the honorary rank of l33t p3rf0rmanc3 studi3s hax0r.* To sign up or ask questions, email jane@avantgame.com. For more information about the workshop leader, visit www.avantgame.com .

*elite performance studies hacker.

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