‘Our Mouths Were Spring’ is an audiovisual performance using real-time game environments.

The work explores how love, the internet and commodities are increasingly intermingled. Between container ships and dating apps, the two players navigate old connections and new, queer identities. The play scrutinises the absolute commodification and exaggeration of our reality into a hyperreality, in which the simulation seems more real than ‘real life’.

We use poetry, song and experimental game mechanics as a form of worldbuilding. This ludic method of artistic explorative research gives us the space to make the hyperreality extended by simulation visible and tangible. We draw parallels between simulation, as described by Jean Baudrillard, and the concepts of magic circle according to Huizinga. Both are artificially created worlds that are only seemingly decoupled from reality and whose origin is no longer comprehensible. This paradox of interaction, the shift of the original zero point and the resulting longing for authenticity and connection is what we want to explore with ‘Our Mouths are Spring’.

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