Getting Involved with the Neighbour’s Thing: Žižek and the Participatory Performance of Reactor (UK)

Abstract

Reactor is an art collective based in Nottingham, UK. They develop immersive, participatory projects that, they claim, ‘explore the ways in which cohesion of social groups is maintained through shared belief systems and collective action’.¹ The group emerged from a curated event entitled ‘Reactor’ that occurred throughout four floors of a Nottingham warehouse in 2002. Their early works, typified by this and the series of numbered events called ‘Function’ (2000–2005, 2012) showcased individual members’ artworks alongside a variety of invited performance and installation artists who specialise in interaction and participation. These were tightly scheduled showcase-style events that occurred most often at ‘Reactor Towers’, Arkwright Street, Nottingham, as well as other artist-occupied buildings and art galleries. Those attending were invited to experience a series of overlapping encounters, participatory performances, and interactive games, each devised by a different Reactor member or guest artist. Participants in the first event, for example, could add to a flock of origami birds, lie on a deflating air mattress and squeeze the air out through a tin whistle attached to its nozzle, or interact with a large string puppet monkey. More recent projects, since 2005, such as Total Ghaos (Crocus Street, Nottingham, 2005), Big Lizard’s Big Idea (Donau Festival, Krems, Austria, 2009; Wunderbar, Newcastle, 2009; ‘Playing the City 2’ Schirn Kunsthalle, Frankfurt, Germany, 2010) and The Green Man and Regular Fellows (Trade Gallery, Nottingham, 2011), have taken the form of conspiratorial role-play games, sinister social experiments, and theatricalised relational aesthetics, each with an idiosyncratic ramshackle tone of irreverence, farce, and frivolity.