IMAGINARY WINDMILLS a.ka. La Mancha 2.0
Provincetown, MA 2011
Imaginary Windmills was a collaborative performance between Justin Shull, Chris
Manzione and I during the Provincetown Eco Art festival in April 2011. Using Chris’
skills of augmented reality, we devised a game to be played partially in the virtual world,
and chose the theme of the wind farm, as it has been a controversial topic on the Cape for
the past several years. Specifically, the Kennedys were known to have opposed the building
of a wind farm off of the coast as it would have disturbed their ocean view. This particularly
reprehensible case of N.I.M.B.Y. prompted the idea of reviving another very famous wind mill
antagonist, the great Don Quixote. Of course Don is fighting “virtual” dragons who are actually
windmills; in this game, Quixote characters would be fighting virtual windmills that actually do
not exist, except in the realm of the iPhone. A test was done in Prospect Park the week before
the event, and everything went swimmingly. Unfortunately in the week between the play test and
the festival, the software company that makes the AR platform decided to come out w a new version
that was full of bugs. So when we got up to Provincetown, the key AR element did not work at all.
What to do? We made an impromptu Conquistador performance in Provincetown, parading through the
village and staging a wind fighting event on the beach were the virtual windmills were supposed
to be. Still not creatively satisfied, we made a short movie in homage to Luis Bunuel’s classic
surrealist film Simon Del Desierto, which is way too boring to upload, but involves lots of
walking and an appearance at a drag karaoke bar by conquistadors.
UPDATE- Finally uploaded the movie, Estas Botas, onto YouTube- see below pictures
