A compliment I often receive is “you’re totally yourself, you don’t care what other people think”. Unfortunately, it’s not true. I worry a lot about how other people perceive me. It’s a bad habit, and an embarrassing one to have carried this far into adulthood. I’ve been told not to worry about this since I was a teenager who was verbally bullied a lot, and I’ve always found the advice illogical. I can’t separate who I am from the way I am perceived by others or from the way I move through the world. This doesn’t mean I feel empty. I feel like a dense mix of reactions that is permeable with the outside world. I try to make art that is responsive and permeable in that way.
Intrapology is my project in live interactive online theatre that centres disabled, neurodivergent, LGBTQIA+ people. Our shows run on our own free open source software Intrinsink, which we’ve developed in community with other artists working in games and theatre. Intrinsink allows the audience to influence what characters say and do through multiple-choice voting and free-entry text. A script shown to actors changes during the performance to reflect these audience interactions.
Intrinsink integrates narrative design approaches from videogames with the liveliness and authenticity of theatre, so we get to tell stories about sociotechnical systems, with sociotechnical systems. The movement between rigidity and fluidity is meaningful, as is the gap between what’s perceived as “human” and what’s perceived as “unnatural” in performance. This is all the more relevant in the AI bubble, when a machine’s capacity for social mimicry is being mistaken for an indication that it is developing sentience. Since social masking can be mechanised, we should look into the gaps in our own everyday performance to find our humanity.
I began working in this format in 2021 as a collaboration with D. Squinkifer, who first developed this approach to software-mediated interactive queer performance for their MFA project Coffee: A Misunderstanding. I suggested that we modify their existing approach to focus on collective voting, and hoped that this might allow us to reflect the way that our social context shapes who we are, what we think, and what we do. We created a test piece about our experiences of autistic masking, and the collective construction of social scripts.
Today we make a series of online interactive science-fiction performances set in a universe of many worlds, where each world is created (consciously or unconsciously) by the society that inhabits it. When people have conflicting worldviews, their world splits, and they find themselves living in two separate fragment worlds. We develop the worlds of this universe through collaborative worldbuilding workshops, using tabletop storygames. This means that our work reflects multiple modalities of interactive storytelling, and decentres the single author while still retaining a clear authorial voice.
I worry that people from interactive theatre prefer the fluidity and openness of improvised performances over the rigidity of scripted work like Intrapology. I am sympathetic to that position, and in fact I’m not even sure I can name anyone who has articulated it, so it may just be my own opinion that I’m projecting onto others. Nevertheless, I want to lean further into this aesthetic rather than seeing it as a flaw to be erased.
Part of it is that as a neurodivergent person, I want to defend the value of stilted speech and scripted interactions. This reflects thinking by neuroqueer theorists such as M. Remi Yergeau, who has argued for the rhetorical agency in autistic ways of communicating that are seen as disordered under neuronormativity. Yergeau highlights non-verbal communication such as hand flapping; Bernadette Bowen has argued in defense of stilted speech and the communication needs of hyperlexic autists. Autistic and transgender social psychologist Devon Price advocates for a process of “unmasking” that includes processing our fears about how we are perceived, and accepting the value of divergent ways of being in the world. The interaction features in Intrinsink reflect both polarities: the need to follow scripts to fit in, and accepting that our authentic ways of communicating might be seen as less “natural”.
We should get curious about the expressive aesthetic of awkwardness. This is a running theme in D. Squinkifer’s work - to take just a couple of examples, Interruption Junction highlights how expectations around conversational turn-taking can make a person feel or seem invisible, and Hold In Your Farts Or Die suggests that both masking and unmasking carry costs. Coffee: A Misunderstanding taught me that awkwardness is not necessarily something to be avoided - a tense silence and a lack of eye contact can mean many things, and we should grant ourselves a degree of agency over that meaning, rather than just seeing it as an intrusion that detracts from desirable, fluid interactions.
Part of my aspiration for Intrapology is to create a space where we might rewrite social scripts for ourselves, and invent idealised contexts in which we can imagine ourselves thriving. And yet, as soon as we invented a utopian community in the Intrapology universe, we started talking about the ways it would fall short, the ways “good communication” can be performative and even violent, and using interruptions to deepen the fissures in smooth interactions.
A healthy and authentic relationship with the world doesn’t fit the cultural ideal of smooth communication that is so easily mimicked by Large Language Models. Things should glitch and pause, our breath should catch, our eyes should meet only briefly. We are permeable beings, and the connections between us are sites of vulnerability. It’s not normal for interaction to feel normal.
