For once, the tables have turned. Thanks to Leo Doulton, longtime voidspace collaborator, your void-in-chief finds herself on the other side of the mic. Read on to find out more about the history of and driving mission behind the voidspace, and why I love the voices in the walls.
Leo Doulton
Well, hello, voidmistress. Welcome to the void. You have welcomed so many people in here that finally the void is chock-full and decided to interview you back. You have interviewed us one time too many, and we would like you to do an interview.
Katy Naylor
If you scream into the void enough times, the void does eventually scream back. It’s nice to know.
Leo Doulton
It does. So, how are you doing today? What’s in your void?
Katy Naylor
Well, my voidspace at the moment is actually full of printouts and little bits and pieces. There’s a garden gnome in there, there’s a sock, there’s a tiny satchel, a Latin dictionary, and various other trinkets and oddments that are connected to next week’s voidspace live festival. Basically, I am in festival and exhibit planning mode, and my void is full of it.
Leo Doulton
I think the best place to start is: you are running, to my knowledge, the only interactive fiction, theatre, dance, everything-else-that’s-interactive magazine, and now also a festival. How did you get here and why? Why would you do this to yourself?
Katy Naylor
Why indeed? Well, I always say that I started a small arts organisation by mistake, which is pretty much true.
I would say that my underlying reason is that I am very passionate and fascinated by any and all art forms that have a core of interactivity. I call it interactivity, although it doesn’t really do it justice, because labels are hard. But to me, there is a core that all of these seemingly disparate art forms have in common.
The voidspace actually started just as a lit mag, back in 2021. I was writing a lot at the time, and I was experimenting with writing Interactive Fiction (IF) and the possibilities that that could hold. I realised that in the publishing world in which I operated, there wasn’t anywhere that was dedicated to publishing IF. I’d got a couple of pieces out through other connections and other means. But it wasn’t anywhere that was dedicated to this form. IF was very much in its own little world, which seems a very happy and thriving little world. They have a couple of regular competitions every year that everyone submits to. Everyone’s happy with that. But it seemed like a real shame that the writers I was encountering in this other particular literary bubble didn’t really seem to know anything about interactive fiction, generally.
Of course, when you see something that’s missing, for some people the obvious solution is to make it yourself. That’s what I did. I set up the voidspace as a platform, both to give a literary outlet to people who already wrote IF – and to try and bring the work created in more of a gaming space to a wide,r or a different, audience – but also to encourage the writers I came across on the indie lit scene, who wrote other types of interesting stuff, to try interactivity in their work. That went really well. The voidspace has been running for three years now, and it’s up to its 10th main edition, with a scattering of other collaborative literary endeavours in between.
But something I realised is that – and this was the beginning of realising how siloed these worlds are when for me – they’re all the same thing, give or take, labels and tastes and your particular angle. I realised a little while into doing this that one of the big things that I’m passionate about is what calls itself immersive or interactive theatre. Basically, for me, that’s art forms that have that core of proper engagement through some form of personalisation in a theatrical setting, in a dance setting, in an audio art setting, in a live art setting, in an opera setting. And that there is a certain commonality between these and the modes of engagement that I was encouraging people to try in their writing on the voidspace.
I realised that there were all these art forms that all share this thing – whatever you want to call it, but that my writers in the voidspace didn’t know anything about them. I thought: what a great opportunity to show people that there’s a wider world out there where this thing is being done in other ways, and in other places. And so, I started running interviews with creators in other interactive forms, to introduce their work into the space.
I keep saying “this thing” ‘m just going to use the word “interactive” from now on. I think I’ve really explained what I mean by that, which is art forms that encourage an additional depth of engagement through personalisation. There you go. That’s the first time I’ve landed on that definition. But let’s call it interactive for now because people get very fussy about labels, which I think is very limiting, but you’ve got to have some way to define it.
I started publishing interviews with creators who operate, in various different ways, in these interactive spaces, mainly at first to enable current readers of the magazine to broaden their horizons. But then I realised very quickly as I went into this, that actually it’s not just the writing world or the gaming world that is siloed. The wider, what I will call interactive arts world is extremely siloed, too.
You have the old-school immersive people who maybe focus on environmental design. You have the newer-school interactive theatre people whose focus is on the ability of participants to maybe change or adapt their experiences. You also have lots of other forms of interactivity. You have direct instruction-led engagement. You have things that encourage people to bring their own experiences to bear onto a piece of work very directly.
Obviously, some people would say: all of these things happen in theatre already. People can bring their personal experiences to bear on a piece of art. They can engage with it, they can interact with it or it interacts with them. But what I’m talking about here are the art forms where this mode of engagement, of personalisation, is foregrounded, is done deliberately and explicitly. I realised that all of these worlds are very siloed as well, and it frustrated me, and so I got onto a bit of a mission to try to widen the definition and to make people aware.
Leo Doulton
There’s a question I really want to ask you. Listening to your description, in addition to what you’ve done and what’s motivated it, I suddenly realised that what you have done is taken a lot of different forms that add interactive as an adjective onto another genre, such as fiction, theatre, opera, dance, whatever, and you have done is said “No, this is a genre in its own right called interactive.”
Other than the fact that the audience have a level of control of the piece, what are the artistic values of that genre ‘interactive’ in the same way that, for example, in an opera, where music expresses something that you can’t express by other means, or in the novel, you are able to explore the internality of a human being. What is the genre ‘interactive’ aesthetically doing?
Katy Naylor
That’s an amazing question. First of all, I would challenge the terms of your question a tiny bit because I think interactive expands beyond just pieces where the audience can affect the outcome of the work. I think it’s also fair to call a piece interactive where it extends an explicit invitation to the audience to insert themselves into it on a personal level in some way, whether it’s through choosing their own path through a detailed physical set, or whether it’s considering and interpreting their own experiences to a piece.
I think all of this is interactive, and what holds it together is the explicit invitation to the audience to make themselves in some way part of the piece. That’s probably the core definition. I suppose if you want an interactive mission statement, you could try this: allowing your audience to explicitly consider their personal experience in the moment in the context of your work and to directly use that with intention, allows for a depth of engagement, be it emotional or aesthetic, that traditional art forms cannot provide.
Leo Doulton
Yes. I think something I also find interesting in your definition is that it does bestow a level of respect to the audience as co-creators of their own experience, or of the work in some cases, which potentially other forms lack. I’d be very interested to see an anti-egalitarian piece of interactive work, because I don’t know if you could do that once you say “You are invited to make with me”.
Katy Naylor
I think interactive is possibly the most egalitarian form out there because, you’re right, it is paying a respect to the audience, and it is saying that your experience in this moment is valued, valid and integral to the work.
I think an interesting way to explore this is to think how what we think of as different genres achieve the same thing. Compare two pieces that you would think have very little in common; I will say one of them is a piece of autoteatro by Silvia Mercurali. What Silvia does is she creates audio work that are often responsive to a particular environment. And she will invite her listener to consider certain things, maybe listen to things that other people are saying, but to really notice where they are in the moment. For example, Swimming Home which was released over lockdown, was designed to be experienced in the listener’s own bathtub. There were other people’s experiences of water introduced into the piece through narration, but as a part of the piece, you were invited as listener to do certain things in your bathtub and to feel certain sensations and consider certain things in this context. It was all about our relationship with water. And if you took out the listener’s sensory and experiences in the moment, it wouldn’t have worked as a piece. It was inviting the experience of the moment to really form part of it.
Then take another piece, which you could say is very separate: Luca Silvestrini’s Protein Dance staged May Contain Food, which is a piece of dance theatre where the audience is seated at tables as part of the presentation, which is all about our relationship with food. We are invited to eat and to share experiences in food in certain ways, not by talking, but through various forms of engagement including direct sensory engagement. At one point, everybody in the audience is given a cherry tomato, and we are all invited to consider it in certain ways, imagine it in certain ways, some of them quite playful and ridiculous, and together eat this cherry tomato and repeat this mantra, I’m probably misquoting, “My name is [ ] and I love cherry tomatoes, and I deserve my place on this earth.” It’s beautiful. Again, it wouldn’t work with the immediacy and the intimacy and the engagement on a deep emotional level, even though it’s playful, without the explicit invitation to the audience to use their own experience in the moment to interact with the piece.
Leo Doulton
You’ve obviously spoken to a vast range of people making interactive work. Is there a common thread uniting this current push towards interactivity?
Katy Naylor
I think there have always been creators in this space. I just don’t think that they have been recognised as a movement before. I think this stuff has been around for quite a long time. I think part of the issues are around labelling. The term immersive, for me, has become almost useless because a theme bar or a piece of dinner theatre can be marketed as immersive. I think it makes people maybe slightly reluctant to see themselves as part of this movement, but I think they are part of it nonetheless, whether they want to be or not. Sorry, guys. You are because I say so.
I think the thing that I’ve noticed in everybody that I’ve interviewed that they all have in common is that they love people. They love their audiences. One can create for many reasons. The thing that’s beautiful about all of these creators, and all of these creations, is that the emphasis is always pushed away from inviting the audience to observe them and say how wonderful they are, towards wanting to bring the audience towards them and to share an experience in common. That’s something that all of these creators have in common. They love their audiences, and they want the audience’s experience to therefore be integral. It’s always going to be slightly in some way about you, as an audience member. As to why there is an upsurge in this work, again, that’s an interesting question because I would say that I have seen a fairly consistent volume of this work over the last 10 years.
Leo Doulton
You see interactive work in a very different way in 1980s, with a community arts point of view or politically active point of view, whereas a lot of this work, for example, is much less politically engaged.
Katy Naylor
That’s true. Although actually, I’d argue that all interactive work is political because all of it, in one way or another, deals with how you as an individual relate to your communal space, whether that communal space is a supermarket and you’re listening to a piece of audio about it, or that communal space is the court of an elven king and you’re trying to work out the social dynamics within that. I would argue that that is inherently political, whether you want it to be or not, but that’s just me.
I think there’s a lot of answers to that question. First of all, I think, like it or not, Punchdrunk were a breakthrough organisation and got into a lot of people’s eyeballs and a lot of people’s brains. A lot of the work that I’ve seen has either been inspired by or inspired by people who were inspired by Punchdrunk. I think it’s a matter of that slightly more mass appeal and more people seeing it, meaning that more people have been inspired to explore this direction and in different ways. I think also what’s been a lovely thing to see in the younger crop of creators is that there’s a lot of explicit thinking about games and play and game mechanics.
I mean gaming as a pastime, not just computer games. TTRPGs, or indie games, all kinds of different games, have, I think, become a lot more mainstream. People have become aware of that interaction a lot more, and that’s inspired people.
I do think also that it is a reflection of where we are as a society in terms of both how we consume our media and how we react to each other. I think people have really fallen out of love with the idea of centralised cultural distribution. You no longer all turn on the TV at the same time and watch the same thing. We have this hyper-personalised streaming model, and a lot of choice in the entertainment that we consume at home. I think people have become used to that sense of feeling in control, and important in that sense.
There’s a spoiled kids theory, isn’t there? That we’re all just used to being pandered to in our and we therefore want to be pandered to in our art as well. But I think that falls very wide of the mark. For me, the thing that is more interesting, and certainly the thing that seems to drive many of the creators that I’ve spoken to, is actually that we live in a de-personalised society. We may have a choice of what to watch on Netflix, but one can argue that that choice is very limited, to how we act as consumer. I think the exciting thing about interactive is that we get to use that agency in an artistic context for something other than consumption. As you said earlier, interactive involves an act of co-creation, and that can be deeply empowering, a sense of choice as creation, when our choices can often feel limited to how we can consume within a capitialist society. It’s a little subversive, joyfully subversive, if you think about it.. Now I come to think of it, that’s why the concept of co-creation is so central to the voidspace. Even at voidspace live, there will be opportunities for attendees to join in, very gently and in a way that will be easy for everyone to do, to make collaborative art.
I think the pandemic also had a massive impact on people, and I think it left people hungry for connection and engagement, and it gave people a renewed appreciation of the value of the people in the room around them. I think there is just maybe more of a trend for people to remember to see the people around them and the humanity around them and to engage with that.
As I say, they’ve always been creators who wanted to do that. I think, as I say, Luca Silvestrini has been doing that with Protein, in various ways, through collaborative, site specific and interactive dance, for the past 30 years. I’m sure there are plenty of other people who I am yet to discover and speak to who are also interested in that.
But I think maybe it’s becoming more widespread because people are valuing it. I think that notion of interactivity coming from a place of love of other humans is gorgeous.
Leo Doulton
Hearing the range of people you’re talking to and indeed, the way that you yourself are constructing this new or helping to construct a new sense of the interactive space, I suppose I’d be interested in how there is a creative act in the way you’re editing and festival programming. Because it’s very easy for those things to be overlooked as creative practices in themselves.
So how do they compare to other creative practices? What is it that you find satisfying and exciting about them?
Katy Naylor
I find the act of curation as creation extremely satisfying because I think I have a real sense of mission that there is essentially a movement happening already, but it’s not being recognised as such.
To be able to notice and bring together and encourage that commonality is very satisfying because I know how wonderful an experience is to be able to find a variety of those experiences. But as a creative act, I suppose I have a vision or I know what this work means and what this work has in common. The sense that I have is that not many people have got the memo on that yet.
For me, the act of bringing together that work and actually explicitly saying to people “Look, this is what it is” is actually shaping something in itself. Maybe an artistic movement by any other name would smell as sweet. But if you make people aware of it and you bring it together, it’s only going to encourage more connection and encourage more creation.
So just to finish off my origin story, I was doing the interviews and trying to bring together these disparate strands of the interactive arts world under one virtual roof. Then I thought, well, wouldn’t it be fun to do that under one physical roof to actually bring in all these different types of creators and just smooth them together until they have to recognise each other, and to bring in audiences and push them to try something new and to recognise that all of these things actually share a commonality in some way.
One of the most satisfying things about creating voidspace live is that it has encouraged the creation of a lot of new work. I suppose you could say I commissioned it. It’s hugely satisfying to see that there are things both in terms of individual pieces, but also the festival itself and the newsletter creation and the pieces that I am publishing that would not have existed or wouldn’t have even existed in anyone else’s head if I hadn’t done it.
And that is fantastic.
I also really enjoy the very gentle worldbuilding that comes as part of the voidspace. My favourite litmag of all time – which has sadly shuttered- was The Bear Creek Gazette. It was established as the newspaper of a fictional, Nightvale-esque town. It made a great wrapper for new weird writing of all kinds, but it also had a real sense of place, and as something that existed outside of the sum of its parts. This is an approach I really wanted to crib for the voidspace: after all, one thing interactive art is really good at is evoking a strong sense of place, even if that place is fictional.
The voidspace isn’t just a platform or an umbrella organisation, its an actual place. I keep it light touch, but I imagine the voidpsace as a dark but cosy, lightly haunted attic, where we have the space to sit quietly and feel the world shift at its roots, where all sorts of things can reach out from the void – from the reality of the writer or creator to the reality of the reader or audience – to touch us directly. That’s why I talk about the voices in the walls: they keep me company up here, and mean it’s always a pleasure to climb up through the hatch, settle into a beanbag and put the kettle on.
Of course, sometimes I AM the void, or the void in chief at least. The void is a very fluid concept, but it is above all both dark and welcoming. Cosy noir. Just remember – the void loves you!
Leo Doulton
With that notion of commissioning and curation, let’s pretend that someone turned up and said “I have infinite money. What’s the fantasy interactive piece you’d want to commission?” Would that be something to read, something to programme, a team of makers? What would be the ultimate fantasy piece for you?
Katy Naylor
Wow, that’s a really hard question, Leo. Don’t make me choose. It’s like having to choose between my children. So, wow, what would I do?
Leo Doulton
It could be any type of piece you’d like to see. For example, you feel that there’s not enough interactive theatre that involves triremes.
Katy Naylor
Well, there it is. I think I still wouldn’t want it to be a single piece. That’s the thing. I was thinking, ‘would I want to do some massive outdoor thing where people could be engaged across a range of different things?’
But no, I think I’d still want to have a diversity of voices. The problem is that my ideal piece is one that I haven’t thought of yet. What I would want to do is to throw the doors open even wider beyond even the circles that we know of and bring in people who haven’t been engaged in this space before and see what they come up with and maybe partner somebody who is unknown to me with somebody who’s known, almost doing an interactive matchmaking service. This is the heart of the voidspace – the artistic vision being the power of collaboration itself, rather than a particular Guiding Vision
I would love to see more work that – and I think this is something that a lot of companies want to do, but I think it’s extremely difficult to do in practice – that heightens the everyday.
We’ve talked about Silvia Mercuriali, and Wiretapper was another favourite of mine, created by Shunt back in 2015. What I loved about those works is that just through use of audio, they can make the world around you seem part of the fiction. But you can also use that for different ends. I’d like to see that explored a lot more.
Leo Doulton
Are there other particular themes that you think you’d like to explore? For example, you could say “I want a festival that explores the theme of ageing.” You could say, “I want a festival of work that explores Paradise Lost.” Is there some prompt like that which you in the back of your mind would go, “Oh, I could do that? Interactive work would do that really well.”
Katy Naylor
You see, I probably wouldn’t because, and I know this sounds less creative, but I don’t believe it is because actually I’m far more interested in what other people’s passions are and what they have to say than what I have to say. As I said before, my thesis is around the power of this very direct form of creative engagement with audiences, and the power of collaboration rather than anything else.
However, if I were given both an infinite pot of money and an infinite amount of, call it chutzpa or hubris, something I love to explore in my own writing, which I think is underexplored, is the connection between people today and people in the past and how things that we see as being exotic and alien because they are from longer ago are actually the ways that people.
For example, my first book of poetry, Postcards from Ragnarok, is a book of poems based on the Old Norse Poetic Edda, but the preoccupation in those poems is the fact that the Tolkenisation of Norse and Anglo Saxon myth – which is a shame because it’s not what Tolkein would have wanted – sells it short. Because actually this mythology, like all mythologies, is just the way that people who lived in whatever time they were telling those stories found of coming to terms with love and death, the strange and the Other, in their world as they perceived it.
For example, in Old Norse mythology, you have Sleipnir – the serpent that encircles the flat earth. The horizon, if you get close enough to it, is actually a serpent. For people in those days who were seafaring and living a time of great danger, of course the horizon is a snake. It’s beckoning and it’s glistening and it’s exciting, but it’s also deadly because that’s what going to sea is, and that’s what watching your loved one sail off towards the horizon is. That lurch into the unknown, to beauty and death.
I think that is something that is underexplored and that I, if I ever get time to write again, want to explore more of, to bring together past and present, and to bring together that understanding that history is just yesterday’s psychology, if you like, or yesterday’s psychoanalysis. And a common attempt that we make as humans to connect with or come to terms with the beauty and danger of the Other.
And so I would love, love, love, love to see work that somehow explores that – because I believe that interactive art – has a real power to affect people on a very visceral level, and make them really feel that connection.
So, if I had the vanity to be able to commission other people to work on my own creative preoccupations, I’d probably choose that.
Leo Doulton
I would absolutely love to come and see a Festival of Interactive Work responding to Norse mythology or other mythologies. That sounds absolutely amazing.
Katy Naylor
That would be the dream. Maybe I should go full vanity project and do it next year!
Leo Doulton
Then moving this towards wrapping up, what would your advice be to someone looking to emulate your success or your path, looking to enter the space as someone who edits, produces, supports, and indeed creates in their own right?
Katy Naylor
I would say don’t have too much of a plan, if you want to emulate my success, because I I think that if I had I realised when I started the voidpsace three years ago that it would lead to creating and curating an entire one day festival, and what that would be like in terms of the complexity and the scale, I would never have gone into it. It would have felt utterly overwhelming and unachievable.
But what I did three years ago is I started a lit mag and I thought “okay, I’m going to release an issue once every three months. I’m going to read some stuff. I’m going to put it online if I like it.”
So start small. Follow where your interest takes you. If I’d started out just trying to make a festival out of nowhere, it would never have worked. Build up your interest, follow your interest, build up your expertise. Talk to everybody, keep an open mind, and don’t assume that your way is the only way because you will find that you can learn so much from people, even if they are not in your natural artistic camp.
Leo Doulton
And then I have two more questions in my head, doubtless more may emerge. First off, what’s next?
Katy Naylor
Well, I’m going to spend some time after this year’s festival, focusing on my own writing. I really want to put together a piece for next year’s Lovecraft Festival. We’ll see how that pans out, if that pans out.
In terms of what’s next for the voidspace, I am not going to be adding any more strings to the voidspace bow. I think I think it’s pretty comprehensive, but I am going to try to scale up next year’s festival. Funding permitting, I want to make it as equitable and inclusive as possible. I will be applying for funding and using that funding to make sure that everybody who is involved is fairly paid.
It may mean more ambitious work because we’ll be able to afford to commission it. Also to make sure that a chunk of that money is used to open up the festival to people who may otherwise be excluded. One thing I’m really proud of this year is being able to secure funding from the incredible Interactive soup to give 10 tickets to people who would otherwise be financially excluded.
I just think it’s just a really, really important part of the work. Also this year’s festival relied so much on goodwill from people giving their time, giving their expertise, a crowdfunder, which was amazing. I’m so, so grateful to everybody who is making this happen. My goal is to secure funding to make it easier for everybody to do this incredible stuff together.
Leo Doulton
Lovely. Any parting words from you?
Katy Naylor
Stay open. Look around you. Don’t be hemmed in by other people’s definitions or your own. Keep an open mind and an open heart, and you’ll be amazed what you can discover.
Leo Doulton
Fantastic. Thank you very much, Katy. Pleasure to trap you in the voidspace for a while, and I’ll return it to you now. Thank you .
Katy Naylor
Thank you very much.
Find out more about Katy’s writing here