Electric Sky 2021 – Gamification!

For our second year at Electric Sky out of sheer convenience and the love of riffing on a theme, we came back as the cult Church of the Black Hole, but with better track suits.

Electric Sky is cross between an artists’ retreat and a hackathon where you’ll spend several days in the woods on the river in an outdoor pop up creativity lab making stuff. 

The current incarnation of the Church of the Black Hole was resurrected in 2018 to save a group of simulated people from a data leak, which manifested itself in their world as a black hole that was slowly killing them. I didn’t document that event very well, but here’s the post of my explainer art that I captured at home.

Anyway,  an Oregon Trail video game gag was involved in almost all of the projects that first year because the theme of the festival was the suggestive: The Digital Frontier. If you solved our (the Church of the Black Hole’s) puzzles, a giant laser projected a message onto the tree line informing you that you died of dysentery. I can’t remember if there was another outcome, but I doubt it.

This year it seemed like a no brainer to continue with the popular potty theme (there’s a lot of precocious children at these!) and then program an Alexa do the hard work of vetting people for our cult, uh, church.

We borrowed a touring toilet from Kurt Bloch’s band Full Toilet (which you can find here on the Subpop record label) to create a good space for Alexa’s audio to resonate in.

Alexa was programmed to bring you through confession, break you down and build you up, cult style. A little projection mapping was used to attract our victims, I mean, flock.

Participants were encouraged to find a track-suited person with the golden plunger and give them the password (full toilet!) and in return, we would give them playing cards to get Karma points for the the second part of our game.

That game involved asking people to do stuff for you and doing stuff for them. The person with the most Karma cards at the end won a prize and became the head of our cult…church. The winner (our god) turned out to be an 8 year old girl, as it should be.

Looking forward to next year!

Squinting into the future – we’re at Vermillion on Cap Hill!

The group and the toilet are continuing their walkabout at Vermillion starting on second Thursday (Feb 10, 2022). Should you be unable to make it and need guidance, want to spread the word, and/or desire to listen again and again to the wisdom our of god (an 8-year-old) captured in an audio interview with Alexa, click below.