Condon told me that he's directing something called SonsbeekLive: The Twentyfivefold Manifestation. It's an art project/live action role playing game happening right now, in a Netherlands forest, with 200 participants. The event coincides with an annual outdoor art display in Sonsbeek forest, and the art is incorporated into the LARP. Set in a distant future where industrial civilization has fallen, the LARP unfolds as the characters come to the forest to worship the art and go through a series of ritualistic rites-of-passage. The haunting, beautiful art in the forest really does look like futuristic monuments.

Influenced by playing a lot of computer games as a kid, and participating in what he calls "an experimental LARP group" in the 1990s, Condon focuses on how games create small moments of abstract beauty — sort of like modern ballet.

What I find intriguing about Condon's work is the way it suggests that participatory, amateur performances like LARPs are nearly indistinguishable from art. Games have always verged on being art, and have certainly been part of art for thousands of years. But gamers have not usually been granted the status of artist. I love Condon's work for showing how LARPers and other kinds of gamers can be artists in their own right, creating public fantasy narratives that are just as worthy of attention as a piece of theater performed at your local rep house.

So does Condon see SonsbeekLive as art, or is it gaming? He says it's ambiguous:

Tis both i suppose. I dont really ask those questions. Art isn't a thing, it's a place/context/discussion. The base of my work is modifying existing games, so - I made a LARP, then I'm modifying it (usually I'm modifying existing games- in this case my own) to create random motion performances in the park around the sculptures. It's like making a live game engine that spits out random performances.

Want to learn more about SonsbeekLive, or participate? Find out more on the website.

SonsbeekLive [official site]

I'm as dubious about experimental theater as the next person, but I watched Condon's strangely moving proposal for the play, tentatively called "Case," and became entranced. He's got footage of Ray Radke, the radical who will play Case, talking about drugs and being a leftist activist in 1960s Missouri. Then he contrasts that with footage of the Baptist theater troupe's performance of a Shakespeare play, complete with a pretty awesome swordfight. And you get some glimpses of the giant red barn/stage, which is near the trailer park outside Columbia where Condon's stepfather lives.

I want to see a documentary about the making of this play, much more than I want to see the play itself. It sounds like total glorious madness. And I was sold on Condon when I saw some of his other art, which includes recreating medieval religious scenes in videogames, and an installation at an art festival comprised simply of several people playing a game of Dungeons and Dragons where every character was lawful evil (the piece was called "Lawful Evil"). He did another piece where he staged deathmatches with local members of the Society for Creative Anachronism. This is high art for nerds and I like it!

Neuromancer Play Proposal [via Tomorrow Museum]