Online duration performance & text-based browser game.
Commissioned by Aspex Gallery as part of the Aspex (life begins) at 40 programme, curated by Vickie Fear and supported using public funding by National Lottery through Arts Council England.
The Sea Changes Into Words is a durational online performance set within a text-based browser game that encourages players to consider their individual participation and positioning within the world they live in and offered a space to imagine possible futures that they would like to be a part of.
This is a continuation of Bettina’s curiosity in alternative ways of presenting and creating live art over the internet, focusing on the ability to experience liveness and feeling presence online by experimenting with readily available and existing online platforms.
This is Bettina’s first work realised as a text-based game, created using an open source software called Twine. The game invites players into a virtual building that is a reimagining of the new Aspex website. Within the game, players can determine their own route to explore multiple rooms and ultimately make their way to an online Gathering Space (Google Docs), where they are invited to write, draw and interact with one another.
Over the first month of its online exhibition (20 May to 20 June 2021), Bettina inhabited the Gathering Space and took the role of its caretaker where she collated and shared written contributions submitted by players of the game, and had conversations with those who visited. This durational performance was punctuated by a series of publicly advertised live events that also took place in the Gathering Space. These were: Opening and Closing Events (20 May and 20 June 2021); a Silent Reading Group (10 June 2021); and a live conversation with Gabrielle de la Puente of The White Pube (15 June 2021).
Created for Aspex Gallery’s 40th anniversary programme of digital commissions, Aspex (life begins) at 40, where commissioned artists were invited to create new work responding to an exhibition in Aspex’s archive, Bettina responded to Suki Chan’s 2012 exhibition, A Hundred Seas Rising, a project that reflected on collective action, particularly sharing diverse opinions on revolution. Connecting this thematic to the time just before the end of UK lockdown in 2021 (when this work was launched), Bettina questioned potential futures and embedded her research on commoning, intersectional feminist ideologies as well as a critical awareness of care and well-being into the work, particularly emphasising the importance of imagination and peer-learning (inspired by Stefano Harney and Fred Moten’s concept of studying with and for one another).
The work was launched as the first of the four digital commissions, and bridged Aspex’s four decades of gallery-based exhibition making with their recent venture into digital commissioning.