Kindness and Civil War is meant to be “a work-play setup.” Its participants can choose to discover and share content, solve plot-based challenges and puzzles, and collaborate in groups to analyze the story and coordinate their activities.
Kindness and Civil War: A Manifesto of Sorts
Gabriel Embeha
This story and work-play set-up is made up of 10 sources of content that contain the basic information to work-play, progress, and succeed in playing people, places and things out. These sources are as follows:
(1)
A feature-film-like production and performance platform named Masks in the Sun. Part documentary, part new wave film noir, part mystery, its story is based on “real life” persons, places, and things in a Midwestern American town. It was written, directed, shot and edited by Gabriel Embeha.
Synopsis
In the town of St. Gabriel, in the Autonomous Province of Michigan, a beautiful still life of economies and privilege on the verge of decay, a documentary filmmaker is videotaping members of a local theatre group as they create an adaptation of A Christmas Carol. In the process of making his documentary, his film becomes enmeshed in stories of conspiracy and murder revolving around an old man suffering from dementia. Simultaneously, within both the town and the old man, the spirits of Halloween and Christmas are running together. Strange scenes are being acted out in a series of masquerades, an ongoing festival season of mourning and excess being mysteriously presided over by an enigmatic figure, seemingly part human, part angel, and part trickster.
Masks in the Sun is not simply a film in the traditional sense. It is like the experience of a disease that does not kill but alters, an odd adventure in which all can take part. It is not only a cinematic interlude where one sees a film and leaves a theatre. It is, because it has no choice, a performance and not only a film.
(2)
A forthcoming novel-length, faux true crime, allegory and detective story that for now is being called The State: A Users Guide or Anna Indiania.
In this story, the narrator tells of a strange conspiracy carried our by a military tech researcher and a spy recruiter/investigative journalist famous for her work on healthcare in conflict zones explores new territory. The narrator sets out to describe how a made-up teams of military and intelligence people are being set up to apparently take over communities across the globe through local nursing homes. These groups are all involved in the adaptation of famous written stories. These stories are being enacted in theater groups and simultaneously being made into films similar to Masks in the Sun. In doing so he comes under the spell of a world whose persons, places and things are engaged in violent conflicts more invisible and intractable than any he had ever been able to imagine.
Anna and David (aka Drew Walker)
Graphite on Paper
(3)
A doctoral dissertation by Drew Walker called Naming the Cause: A Cultural Critique of the Alzheimer’s State and subsequent renderings of it.
(4)
A number of other organizational and personal websites and social media sites (many defunct) linked to the stories, as well as documents associated with these websites.
CJL
Website
(5)
Geocaches (many defunct) and virtual caches in points around the world.
(6)
Photos of all sorts taken and posted both by characters and players. Some are surveillance photos.
(7)
Theatrical Shorts, in which actors will interact with players online, by telephone, and in person, showing key players different places where story events continue to take place, more details about characters, and so on.
(8)
Sound Shorts, including recorded surveillance of meetings, musical pieces, and interviews with different persons.
(9)
Mixed Media Objects, as described under Objects above.
(10)
Mixed Media Objects as described in Moving Objects above.