Closing the Spiral

After my initial comments, here are pictures and further personal impressions on the transmedia experiment that closed a few weeks ago.

The Series

Watching The Spiral was really fun. In many ways, this was the first time I watched a very European drama, something that had “EU” stamped all over it, that didn’t feel forced or lame. Sure it’s still a cops & robbers show, but instead of trying to look as badass and ghetto as American series, they really leveraged something Europeans have that Americans don’t: lots of centuries of academic artistic culture. And just like building the EU is sometimes not so sexy and difficult, seeing the cops flying coach, talking about budget cuts, and hanging out in Brussels instead of NYC or DC was refreshing. Finally, both the various accents and the whitish photography really made you feel the cold of northern Europe, and that was a nice change from the regular phonetics and aesthetics of American TV shows.

In terms of characters and acting, the cops and bad guys were a bit over the top, for example Tommi Korpela felt a bit too Nick Nolte for me, and I liked Thure Lindhardt much better as the painter experiencing artist’s block in Eddie: the sleepwalking cannibal than as a baddie in The Spiral.  I guess my favorite performance was by Thomas Ryckewaert, not sure whether it’s because he looks a bit like my father, had the most well-developed character, or because I identify best with copyists/ losers/ “apparently-weak-nice-guys” characters. He just appeared deeply human and touching. Of course I loved the heist parts, but my favorite bits were the A-Team or Ocean’s 11-style preparations that incorporated philosophical questioning on the goal of art, politics etc. This culminated in a scene where they gang tried to create half a dozen fake masterpieces in a few hours in a hotel room, indeed questioning whether “everyone is an artist”.

The game

While catching the episodes on Arte+7 replay website wasn’t too hard, making time to play the game was a bit harder in between sickness and work travel. I don’t like video games in general, and did not try most of the online casual games on the Spiral website. I did use my credits to  click around the map of Europe and found some paintings, but triangulation isn’t exactly the most fun gameplay.

In terms of roleplaying, as explained before I would have been much more comfortable creating a character instead of joining the game as my real online persona. Therefore, I decided to use the little free time I had to answer the Spiral’s challenges and create some art.

Tree hugging challenge: why not go meta and hug Klimt’s “Tree of life” instead of the requested outdoors plant?

Invaders challenge: find a Space Invader and take a picture with you in it. Yes, it’s there, tiny but there.

Who killed Victor Detta? An easy one based on the character’s stunt with fake Euros. Yes, mine were real.

Courbet-style self-portrait. As I wrote at the time, good thing they didn’t ask us to re-enact “L’origine du monde”.

Gravity challenge, aka Im on mai side, fuxxing wit ur persepshunz. Note the “Playground” product placement. Sooo meta. Also, water-based spirit gum is crap.

While these are far from perfect, the challenges made me create stuff (not sure whether it’s art) I would have never done without the game, and they made me reflect about what art is, the interplay between creativity and craftsmanship etc. Not bad for TV-transmedia-thingie! But the most fun I had was actually in real life.

Not-that-alternate reality

The physical events of The Spiral, whether performance or scavenger hunt-like, were in held in northern Europe, meaning I couldn’t join, but I wasn’t the only one. So I did my part to connect with non-northerners by dropping business cards with codes that would give them game points in the USA, Italy, France and Switzerland. I usually arranged them in the shape of a spiral and left them on or in front of museums and other artistic buildings. The Swiss one was the most fun because it was player-prompted. On the Spiral’s artist community, a Genevan guy was wondering whether there was a way to get some codes in Switzerland, so on that night I just took the train to Geneva, found the theater were a troupe called La Spirale was based and took a few pics to hint at their location on facebook.

Look for la Spirale to find the Spiral

He later traveled to that place, found the cards and even left some for others. It may be the organizer/GM in me, the wannabe graffiti artist or whatever, but I just loved sneaking in an empty neighborhood at night and making a paper Spiral which gave online points to track real paintings that were fictitiously stolen.

Reality also caught up with me minutes after I finished watching the series finale: I was awakened by a loud boom, followed by the sound of broken glass. This was not a Europol SWAT team storming my place but the frame with Klimt’s Tree of life crashing on the floor. Even though I vacuumed the place, to this day people who walk barefoot in my living room still sometimes reenact Johanna MacDonald’s performance in the Spiral’s opening credits.

Unfortunately this one was not fake glass…

And in a final echo to blurring the border between fiction and reality, guess what happened a few days ago?

Conclusion: The Spiral was fun even though I was not at the top of my game, as expected I need to read that book about pervasive games to incorporate some of that in my larp writing, and the next blog post will be a good ol’ fashioned larp critique!