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In this fascinating piece the company worked in collaboration with the Computer Research Group of the School of Computer Science at Nottingham University, UK.
The piece was one of the most complex and powerful responses to the first Gulf War produced within the sphere of theatrical practice.
Inspired by Jean Baudrillards The Gulf War Did Not Take Place (1991), and constructed following computer game logic, Desert Rain can be seen not only as a comment on the war itself, but also as an exposure of the crucial role that technology played within both the making and the viewing of the conflict. Described as a mixture of performance, game, installation and virtual reality (Adams and Row Farr in Leeker, 2001: 744), Desert Rain attempts to articulate the ways in which the real, the virtual, the fictional and the imaginary have become increasingly entwined. (Adams in Blast Theory, 2002).
Exposing the fragility and interconnectedness of the physical and the virtual, the fictional and the factual. (Clarke, 2001: 44), the piece was constructed as a journey through a virtual labyrinth aimed at disorienting the body in a very corporeal way (ibid.: 47). The viewers, stripped of their belongings, were given a hooded black jacket and asked to identify their objective from a card with the picture of an unknown person. They were then led to six chambers where by shifting their weight on footpads, acting as joysticks, they were able to move virtually through their avatars in an environment that was projected in front of them on a fine water spray, or screen.
At a crucial moment in the piece the virtual environment was unexpectedly penetrated by a real performer who slowly emerged through the rain screen to hand over to the viewer another magnetic card. No words were spoken and as quickly and mysteriously as the performer had appeared they would also disappear again, as if swallowed up from the world behind the screen: 'this momentary interruption of the game disrupts the telepresence experienced by the participant, for it fractures their solipsistic virtual engagement with the screen and points to the potential of something existing beyond the realms of the image. (
) It is therefore the performing live presence existing alongside the vitriol world that enables a critique of virtual technologies to be considered.' (Clarke in Blast Theory, 2002)
The exchange of one card with another led to the beginning of a third phase of Desert Rain in which viewers found themselves in a vast underground hangar containing numbers, which were in fact estimates of Iraqi casualties. This part of the game could only be successfully completed if all players reached the end of the corridor. Players who had reached this phase were therefore encouraged to help others who still had to find their target.
Once the virtual world experience was concluded, the final phase of the performance could start. Having left the virtual world in a ritual act of purification by walking through the water screens, the viewers found that the narrow exit corridor was blocked by a large mountain of sand. Having climbed up and come down the other side they would find that they had reached the final room of the piece. This space, simulating a motel room, contained a television that could be activated by swiping the card obtained from the performers during the virtual game. By swiping the card, each viewers target appeared on the monitor sitting in the very same hotel room that the viewers were in.
At this point it became manifest that each of the six targets had their life changed by the War. All targets had been talking about their relationship to the events during the conflict and how real it all felt (Blast Theory, 2000). However, even at this point it was impossible for the viewers to tell whether the targets were real or fictional, and in fact one of the characters, the actor, even spoke about the event as layer upon layer of simulation reverberating from every surface (Clarke, 2001: 47). Upon leaving the room, the viewers could finally change back into their original clothing and then leave, still unaware that some time later, they would find something unexpected in their pockets - a small box of 100,000 sand grains reporting a quotation from a speech by General Colin Powell from the New York Times of 23 March 1991 referring to the possible number of Iraqis killed during the war: Its really not a number Im terribly interested in.
The very set of Desert Rain was a contamination of the real and the virtual, each mirroring the design of the other, and connected through the permeable and physically traversable rain curtain. (Blast Theory, 2002). As explained by Adams, here, just as in the case of the real conflict, the real penetrates into the virtual and vice versa (in Leeker, 2001: 744). This hybridity and contamination between ideology and aesthetics, real and virtual, performance and life, was once again also perceivable at an ontological level.
(source: http://presence.stanford.edu:3455/Collaboratory/348)
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