Reimagining Romance: Rob Elford’s “Love with NO FUTURE” at Void Space Live

Film and Media Production Tutor, Rob Elford, considers alternative ways to show your film projects.

Making films or media doesn’t just need to be limited to film showings in a cinema. Audiences can engage with your work through numerous alternative methods, such as live events, exhibitions, and online screenings. Void Space Live, an annual festival at London’s Theatre Deli, serves as a prime example. Void Space Live is the UK’s largest grassroots festival for video games, interactive plays and immersive artworks. This year, I am displaying a large interactive installation as part of this event. This project provided a valuable chance to apply my knowledge, as I am currently studying for a doctorate focused on methodologies for producing and exhibiting interactive animation and film.

If you’ve ever flipped through an old magazine or clicked on a link and ended up taking a compatibility test, you will know the often disappointingly predictable results. They ask about your ideal date, your favourite traits, and how many kids you want, wrapping up your entire relational destiny in a neat, and very heteronormative bow.

But at this year’s Void Space Live, I am completely disrupting that tired script.

My latest immersive installation, Love with NO FUTURE, hijacks the nostalgic format of the classic love quiz to deliver something far more radical: a deeply thoughtful, reactionary queer critique of what it means to build a future with someone.

The piece may sound fluffy, but my inspiration draws directly from the writings of queer theorist Lee Edelman. Edelman famously critiqued “reproductive futurism”, the societal tendency to filter all political, social, and moral choices through the lens of protecting a figurative, idealised child.

In the real world, this narrative is frequently weaponised against the LGBTQ+ community. Historically, it was used to restrict basic queer rights under the guise of protecting family values. More recently, it manifests as a subtle cultural pressure pushing queer adults to assimilate into highly traditional, family-friendly, heteronormative boxes just to be deemed socially acceptable.

Love with NO FUTURE blends physical and digital worlds, combining animation, installation and voice recognition technology.

The experience unfolds through a series of questions directed at the participant by an animated love demon called Sitri. Responding directly into the receiver of a vintage telephone, each vocalised answer is collated into a final score that triggers a range of outcomes. These results challenge participants to conceptualise partnerships, configurations, and possibilities that exist outside of conventional societal expectations. It offers a glimpse into a future with no future or, at the very least, one liberated from the heteronormative ideals we’ve been conditioned to desire.

I would encourage you to consider how you might find your own unique solutions for exhibiting your own ideas and projects. Could you show your work as part of a theatre production, or perhaps as the backdrop to a gig? There are many ways, as filmmakers and world builders, that we can find new audiences to see and enjoy our work.

Links: 

Theatre Deli

Void Space Live

Instagram

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