Your Ghost Body is both a video game, hand-made by Syers, and an analog performance in which the audience collectively acts as the player. A memory palace in the form of a playable junkyard, its live medium is luminous radio, working the edge between sound, text, song, and projection. Its poetics come from the vestiges of afternoon TV game shows and text adventure games. Built as a way to index what remains, as psychic possession, of the landscape of childhood and adolescence, it asks what to do in middle age with a vestigial homing instinct for a place no longer inhabited. Your Ghost Body summons the figures carried in memory as a cloud of ghost bodies: past selves, selves we didn’t become, and the presences of both the dead and the still living who formed something in us. The game makes a space for a brief communion, pivoting from the author’s memories to the audience’s.
At The Chocolate Factory Theater, the game will be performed (and played) live.
Created by Karinne Keithley Syers with collaborators: Kate Benson (performer), John Gasper (performer), Aviva Jaye (performer), and Sara Walsh (designer).
