GRRF: The Sound of Suicide Postponement (2009)
Running time: 80 minutes. Written by Tristan Newcomb. Produced & Directed by Tristan Newcomb and Simon Quiroz. Music by Tsuyoshi Oyama. Associate Producers: Brett Stalbaum, Roberto Rosales, Chelsey Grasso, Cy Cary. Cast: Tristan Newcomb, Brett Stalbaum, Jared Hinkle, Ricardo Dominguez, Travis Cochran, Holly Eskew, Derek Lomas
Once upon a time…back in that strange world known as 2004…a new performance art genre was born. Thanks to Prof. Brett Stalbaum, it even gained a clever name: Demo Noir, the faking of a software or tech demonstration in order to perform a stealth theater piece. Here was the tortuous recipe:
1) Write an original theater piece that closely resembles your everyday, ordinary, glitch-filled presentation of a new piece of software – such as a video game, or even a new GPS application. But instead of actually having a real piece of software to demonstrate, craft a very long video clip of your dysfunctional “software” in action. This video clip is put on a DVD.
2) When giving the “software demo” to an audience, only pretend to hook up your laptop to the big projection screen behind you. Secretly start the DVD instead. Because the video clip on your DVD includes a common laptop background, folks will wrongly assume that what they are seeing is coming “live” from your laptop. It is really just the DVD they are watching, running non-stop and without pause – but they don’t know this.
3) Rehearse the piece over and over until your faked interactions with the laptop and other tech equipment are completely in sync with the events and glitches occuring on the DVD, so that the audience will continue to believe that what they see on the screen is the actual software running on your laptop.
4) When writing the theater piece that accompanies this dysfunction – i.e. all the explanations, dialogue and interactions – have the software demo slowly drift into surreal morbidity and bitter existential absurdities, complete with emotionally crippling technical frustrations and lots of deadpan despair. In other words, gradually go from believable bland & vanilla to complete meltdown – but again, it must get believably worse and worse and worse…until the audience is being immersed in a mixture of Mamet, Bosch, Hendrie, and (thanks to the rationalized inclusion of bizarre puppet videos) the secret nightmares that Sesame Street gave us all as youngsters…and yet you must keep the audience believing that it is all real. Keep them believing it is a real demo being presented by real software engineers who really, truly want to get their project to work – no matter how freakishly absurd and abusive it all gets.
5) Give this doomed demo in any location where a normal demo would take place, such as a lecture hall for a computer science class. And, naturally, neglect to inform the audience that what they are about to see is a theater piece. In our experience – in a standard demo environment with a professorial introduction - at least 80-90% of the audience continue to believe it’s all real, up to the very last agonizing moment.
And so, in 2004, on the campus of UC San Diego, Demo Noir was born. After being performed roughly a dozen times, with frequent changes to the content and performers, we snuck some HD cameras into a classroom, captured an extremely smoldering and intense Demo Noir in full, and used the entire performance as the core of our first feature-length movie. Without further ado, here’s the trailer:
Where to get it: Amazon DVD / Amazon Video-on-Demand
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Description & extra trivia bits:
The main part of the movie is an uninterrupted fifty-minute Demo Noir performance, captured live in front of an actual, unsuspecting university audience. On that day, the students were simply told by their actual professor (Brett Stalbaum) that there would be a guest lecturer who was going to demonstrate an important new technology regarding campus safety, which will involve mandatory GPS tracking of individual students at all times – as a method to prevent student pedestrians being mowed down by cars at campus crosswalks. This doesn’t even make sense from a safety perspective – how can knowing a student’s location keep them from getting hit by a car? Yet the audience accepts the premise in silence.
As can be seen in the movie, some students exit the decaying demo in dismay, or even in horror – many of them not learning it was all a hoax until several days later.
The first part of the movie is the fictionalized backstory of where that dysfunctional demo person comes from, and what leads him to become a performance artist who fakes such demos in order to slowly, dramatically self-destruct in front of a live audience. In this version, he”s a rather dull, lonely fellow from a huge gaming company, being pursued and pestered by a young, unseen intern who is filming a promo piece. He clearly isn’t someone from the art world, or who would much like (0r understand) modern art, but he creates this “new kind” of performance art because it’s the most effective way to let students truly feel the horror of what being an anonymous employee on a massive, endless buggy software project is like.
Where the name comes from: before this new genre got its official moniker of Demo Noir, the pieces were titled GRRF - an acronym for “Gaming Response Research Foundation” – a fictional research center for new gaming technologies. There have been roughly thirty performers that have come and gone in the GRRF collective; the only two permanent members have been writer/lead performer Tristan Newcomb, and performer/sponsor Prof. Brett Stalbaum.
A partial list of previous GRRF performers: Prof. Brett Stalbaum, Cy Cary, Jesse Chapo, Jared Hinkle, Lance Miyamoto, Prof. Ricardo Dominguez, Prof. Amy Alexander, Jamila Mahfudh, Huong Ly, Gary Wong, Ross William Campbell III, Ben Ng, Lilia Hu, Jason Kwan, Kelley Kim, Fernando Gonzales, Cecily Madanes.
