Paolo Cirio

- What is the plot behind “the big plot” and how does it evolve for the viewers?

There are two meanings for the world ‘plot’, one is related to the storytelling field and the other to the political conspiracy. Both are included in the project, as experimental way to tell a story as well as to infiltrate a real conservative political movement with a super sentimental love story, until the effective plot of doing home made espionage with spying the life of a real spy.

The most interesting aspect of this new form of fiction is its expression, which penetrates the reality and bring the audience in a real story. It’s like a subjective shot in cinema: social networks are recording our experiences, sentiments, relations, etc, so many stories are already there, and people like stories, that’s why we like to spy the gossip of our friends, or of unknown people. Unfortunately most of the stories of common people are boring, that’s why i tried to do something of more exciting with actors and thrilling stolen identities.

Recombinant Fiction is a label that i had to define after realizing that other former experiments of cross-media storytelling were weak of theory, probably because they are often advertising or games (Guerrilla Marketing and Alternative Reality Game) and there weren’t just stories but always with commercial purposes or with a challenge of a final tangle to solve.

I found that the Recombinant Theatre theory by Critical Art Ensemble fits very well most of the aspects of this new way of doing active political fiction. In particular CAE has suggested about the way of how performers should be, basically nowadays in order to enact a character of a story is needed to include all stages, real and virtual, where the role plays. Social Networks phenomenon underline the identities matter, so now any performer should care about the electronic identity as well the costume depict the character.

However media like social networks may have incredible potential of networking, sharing of knowledge and aggregation of people for claims. I think social networks will replace political parties with a more direct participatory democracy, of course, not with corporative and commercial platforms but with P2P technologies.

So many people around the world joined the story, they are interacting with the personages and some participants proposed to act in it, however as the story is still running i can’t say which will be the end and what will happen!
At the moment most of audiences are gamers or random people, they are not interested in politics or in network critics, and it has been an objective of the project as it’s a form of Invisible Theatre (theory by A.Boal which i linked with the Recombinant Theatre by CAE), so the fiction should have a maieutic function and brings people to thinking about their beliefs and behaviors.

http://www.thebigplot.net