Perfomance Structure:

"Re-Playing The Other World Kingdom" will be four, 5-minute rule-based performances by two pairs of actors engaging with one another and custom set pieces on the stage of MIT.nano Immersion Lab's OptiTrack motion capture system. It will be open to an audience of ~30 MIT affiliates IRL. At the same time, the live motion tracking "machine vision" of the event will be simulcast online to a larger audience who can interact with the performance online through this website.

The performance is a "Re-Playing" of the Other World Kingdom (OWK), a femdom micronation based on highly choreographed rule-based ritualistic encounters within an "absolute matriarchal society" that occupied a physical renovated 15th-century castle in the Czech Republic from 1998-2008 and was re-built digitally in the original online metaverse Second Life from 2007-2011.

The OWK realized the dream of a western matriarchal society of “seperatist feminism” long predicted in fiction like Herland (1915), yet remains obscure. Its engagement with various media formats provides a valuable history of platforms from the 90s to today. The project looks backward at the OWK as a valuable precedent for how the forces of intimacy, power, capital, ritual, gender, and embodied experience interact between the “real world” and cyberspace in a time of impending metaverse ubiquity. The project forces the OWK’s multiple historical forms to confront contemporary politics and media formats through the vehicle of a short IRL/online scripted performance.

Directors:

Ian Erickson (he, him), M.Arch I student at the Harvard Graduate School of Design.

Performers (Casting Ongoing):

Riven Ratanavanh (he, him),  NYU ITP masters graduate.

Jocelyn Beausire (she, they), M.Arch I student at Princeton University.

Set design materials:

Xavi Aguirre (they, them), MIT Assistant Professor of Architecture.

Rigging:

Wendi Yan  (she, her), MS Fiction and Entertainment student at SCI-Arc.

Partners and Supporters:

MIT.nano
MIT Immersive Media Lab