Interview: Reactor

What is Reactor?
Dan: We make various types of art projects that often put the audience in a central and interactive role, and as such we build environments that could be thought of as microcosmic worlds. It doesn’t involve theatre or acting a part but everyone involved is taking on a role of themselves in an alternate reality.
Niki: It creates its own artworks that happen to take the form of social situations but these events allow other artists to make art within that.

Does the art change depending on the audience you get in?
Dan: Each project has its own identity and its own backstory. Our Ghaos project in 2005 was based on a totalitarian regime. You were given a job role in that regime and everything in it appeared quite strict and the aim was to move up the hierarchy and get into positions of power so that you could manipulate this world within your own vision.
Niki: Some people stick to the rules and others look to break them at every opportunity. You’re constantly reconfiguring your own role in the world and working out how to act against or with the kind of elements that are floating around you.
Dan: Some of our projects have been out on a busy high street with a portal into the project. In one called Big Lizard’s Big Idea we had a big mascot character out on the street with his entourage and this “fun bus” and there were people out on the street trained to engage passers-by in this kind of elusive marketing campaign.

So what was the big idea Big Lizard had?
Niki: We were interested in having mascot characters and how this mascot supposedly stood for something. There were games and stories, some of which prepared you for the fact that Big Lizard is a member of this alien race who are about to take over the earth and he’s choosing which humans to save.

How do you keep people involved and engaged?
Niki: In some ways we’re not actually doing that much to get people involved. Some people don’t like it when you don’t tell them what’s going on and can either get angry or act bizarrely towards it. 
Dan: We did a piece called The Green Man & Regular Fellows last year at One Thoresby Street with Trade Gallery. We materialised an old country pub in the gallery and it was a private members’ club that you registered for by post.
Niki: And once you were there you could either sit back and enjoy your drink or you could investigate how to get more involved if you wanted to explore things further, going into the back space of the pub for more “experiences”.

Some of this is sounding like some of Stanley Milgram’s social experiments…
Niki: I don’t think we necessarily set up situations to the extreme of Milgram, where you think you’ve killed someone by pressing a button. Sometimes people have referred to our
work as social experiments, though. 
Dan: If you’re doing a social experiment you’re usually limited by one goal. With Reactor there’s something always happening that turns the thing on its head and asks a new question.

If it’s the audience that are getting all the yucks, what do you as artists take from it?
Niki: I guess we’re interested in not knowing everything about the work and seeing how these things develop. 
Dan: You never know how people are going to behave in certain situations so it’s always exciting when they do things you’d never expect. You can tell everybody they have to shave their heads and then leave some clippers on a table expecting that nobody actually would, but there are a certain amount of people who do it.

Do you have people who try to hijack the whole thing? Do you have to do anything to
put a stop to that?
Niki: No, we encourage it to happen - it doesn’t happen often enough. Different things people can do can only really add to the overall experiences. Really, the only rogue element that are slightly detrimental is when people don’t want to be involved.
Dan: I think the projects are set up in such a way that they make people feel like they should conform and behave in a certain way and often that makes them less rebellious.

How did Reactor start? It’s great, if a little strange...
Niki: Reactor’s ten years old this month and it all started with an exhibition that, compared to what we do now, was relatively static. There were things like airbeds that you would lie down on and they were connected to penny whistles and you could play them like instruments. It was interactive but it wasn’t so much that situations were being co-authored by the people coming in. 
Dan: Over time we became less interested in the objects as objects and more interested in the environment in which people encounter things. 
Niki: I guess it comes through a process of making something and realising that it wasn’t what we’d made that was interesting but what happened around it. We’ve also been affected in a number of ways by members coming and going in either very subtle or very distinct kind of ways.

You’re bringing back Function, one of your earliest projects, this year. Why the hiatus
and why did you bring it back? 
Niki: We’re interested in what would happen if we were to start doing events that we did seven years ago, and what would they be like now. When we started up the Function events we decided there was only going to be five, but now we like the idea of resurrecting something. We did our first Function event at Primary recently. Depending on what happens we might have to move from Nottingham but we’re waiting on that one.

What is it that’s kept you in Nottingham in particular over the past ten years?
Dan: It’s great because we’ve got an audience who have followed us over the years and have been to a lot of things in that time. Hopefully we can build on that from having more events in the city.
Niki: We had to move out of our old space near the train station after the building got compulsorily bought for the new tram line. Through moving to this new space at Primary we have found a new community of artists who’ve spurred us on to be a bit more committed and contribute to things that are going on here.

What does working together for ten years mean to you guys?
Dan: I haven’t really spent a lot of time reflecting on it. Every so often you look at the current situation and decide to continue because there’s always projects on the table that you want to realise that are just a little bit out of your grasp.
Niki: A lot of people say that what we should be doing is we should be producing things and then start touring them. Once you start touring these things you create surplus value because you don’t have to spend as much time making things in terms of time and money. But we’re not interested in that.

With your tenth birthday on the horizon, what can people expect?
Niki: The first one is Reactor’s tenth birthday party. It is just a party but it will have a Reactor spin on it to make a little more of it. It’s a fancy dress affair and will be about people regressing and thinking about a costume you’d choose when you were ten. Pil and Galia Kollectiv are curating this music event so there’s three performances happening with bands as part of that.  Then Daniel Oliver is curating an event called Live Art Dogging which is a series of one-on-one performances for voyeuristic audiences. We’re also working on a project for a village in North Wales. That’s going to be quite involved.
Dan: We’re looking for people to take a few days with us and take a little break.
Niki: It’s an immersive idea but on a slightly larger scale than we’ve ever done before.

Reactor Halls E02 followed by a performance from Pil and Galia Kollectiv happens on Friday 14 December.

Reactor website