Fireworks and Gunpowder:
the Boiling Mist

2021
Role action gameplay, environment
Performers: Ilya Borisov, Alexandra Dyomina, Daria Kucher, Anna Mayorova
Edition for Training Fantasia: Exhibition

The Fireworks and Gunpowder board game is based on a game designed to prepare intelligence analysts to deal with complex crisis situations. Such games are built similar to the “Pandemic” game, where a group of people work together to fight deadly viruses that threaten to spread around the world.

Using game mechanics, Fireworks and Gunpowder recreates a cooperative action in a turbulent world that has descended into the mist of hybrid war. The Night State of the Power Bureaucracy, which represents an information autocracy, uses blurred boundaries and proxy politics to fight its opponents, and the task of the temporary communities is to discover its influence by developing new instincts for existence. Cooperating with each other, the players — Ocean, Activist, Artificial Intelligence, Red Fox, Plasma — must resolve the crisis in different environments such as privacy, cryptography, war on terror, etc. Turning to the concept of “the elsewhere”, which anthropologist and historian Alexei Yurchak developed in his book on the collapse of the USSR, “Everything was Forever, Until it was No More”, Kirill compares this state with today’s experience. Information bubbles and factoids, which can mean anything, depending on who uses them, the impossibility of an open manifestation of their position, the struggle of democracies and autocracies in the digital media world, the blurring of the boundaries between politics and technology, and the increasing volatility of the world force us to plunge into our own kind of internal migration — to the elsewhere.

The work, created by Kirill Savchenkov for the 12th Gwangju Biennale, will be shown at the Training Fantasia exhibition in an expanded form, like a board game letsplay by means of a live action role-play. During the exhibition, four performers will resolve the conflicts of today and overcome the growing volatility of the world of post-truth and information transparency, global surveillance and digital proxy wars in the exhibition venue of the Typography Center for Contemporary Art. The background for their play will be a poem that will gradually appear and disappear.