Art in the Age of Social Networking

How Allotment 4 managed to work is a mystery. Not knowing what to expect and having paid little attention to the programme I found myself adrift on sea of anarchic, interactive events that spanned theatre, visual art and music. It’s like a tasting menu at a posh restaurant, with the National Theatre of Scotland playing Heston Blumenthal, attempting elaborate, alchemical fusions. That it was an outright success is what I hope to emphasise; how it came to be that way can remain a mystery for all I care.

Near the entrance to the venue, situated in Govan Cross Shopping Centre, you can voyeuristically peek through a window at performance artist Rose Ruane as wannabe starlet. Dressed in a vile combination of lace and Lycra, complete with Lady Gaga-esque hat, she dances and lip-syncs to pop songs in a bedroom setting.

We later find she is broadcasting herself on a television inside the venue and that, surprisingly, her mediated self is far more cringey than her fleshy alternative. Ruane satirises our post-Warholian culture where everyone is a celebrity and each of us has their 15 minutes of fame, even if it is only on YouTube.

I was soon whisked off to a secret location where ten of us were confronted by a huge boat with a large wooden puppet who addressed us in Californian surf-speak, telling us dudes and dudettes to split into two groups and race remote controlled surfboards around a course. Meanwhile, a drummer and guitarist played live surf tunes.

The surf experience was ridiculous but amazingly surreal nonetheless. If the makers themselves (Robbie Thomson and ACD Ferguson) weren’t so shambolic it might have been deemed a disaster, but they seemed to enjoy it just as much as us.

Back in the venue I took part in Christie O’Carroll’s Six Degrees of Separation. Six people are lined up and, with O’Carroll’s guidance, we discover how we are all connected through mutual acquaintances. Only it was a little rushed and lacked vigour. O’Carroll seemed to want simply to prove that we are all separated by six degrees and missed the potential of digging deeper, allowing the six of us to get lost in cul-de-sacs of commonality.

I then took my chances on the Love Calculator. Eight of us stand round a cardboard device that asks us questions to determine who out of the other seven people we are best suited to fall in love with. Not being superstitious in the slightest I nonetheless found myself confident that it would work, that tonight was the night, and one of these seven lucky individuals was going to fall head-over-heels in love with me because a cardboard machine said so.

What struck me about this particular event, and in many ways all the events at Allotment 4, was its ability to make people interact, relax and enjoy themselves. At times the work in general felt a little twee and friendly (less so Ruane’s harder hitting cringe-fest), but this only encouraged a friendlier, more enjoyable atmosphere where people could mingle. And maybe this is where the true artistry lies, in that ability to bring people together. Likewise, perhaps the art work is the immaterial connections which exist between us and not simply the material that lies before us. This is art in the age of social networking.

I didn't find love, though.