Hi. Ta for having a look. Yes, we're asking for dough, but just hear us out. First we need seven Players, and then we need bums on seats. Just read us out, OK?

Vision - the Play's the Thang...

The aim of this cyber-play, of this global cyber un-performance project, is pretty simple. We few - we happy few - want to raise as much filthy loot as we possibly can, and then physically destroy it. And keep doing so on a regular anonymous basis, just to see how much money we can fuck up. Burn. Seriously. This is serious.

Instead of asking why anyone would want to write a cyber-play as fuckwitted as this, we'll answer some obvious questions, and then explain how we're going to (try to) go about it.

Who are we?

We're the K-Players, a global cyber-ensemble. Just some cyber-luvvies who are fucked off with the vapid state of contemporary Human Art in general, but in particular with gobby wanker 'visual' artists who can't draw, paint or sculpt for wet shit. We can't draw, paint or sculpt for wet shit either, but we're cyber-writers and cyber-actors, not visual artists. And we are WELL FUCKED OFF with talentless loudmouthed 'visual art' jerk-offs pissing on our fucking turf. Blah blah blah, they all go, pissing on our only tools of trade - words. These dreary talentless illiterate fucking arseheads. Go and check out Pseuds Corner, or any Department of Cultural Studies, or any modern art column. Blah blah fucking blah. We say, either shut the fuck up and draw us all a few nice pretty pitchas, o tiresome scrum of cretinous motormouths, or piss right off out of the art game altogether. Piss off and become the mediocre IT clerk your thundering lack of substantial creative talent more aptly equips you to be. Go on, fuck off.

Are we rip-off merchants?

No. You're just going to have to take our word on this for now.

Do we have any political, ideological, religious, economic, creepy, scary, nasty hidden blah blah blah etc agendas?

No. This website has no meaning beyond the cyber-play you see unfold here, however it goes. As it stands, the play proper hasn't started yet. Call this the Prelude. Actually, we K-Players don't exist yet, either. And this whole thing will probably go down the toilet before we even get started. And we will look like dipshits. But then that's cyber-theatre for you. (You ought to try the real biz some time. K mean it's one thing to die in cyber-space, but on the luddite boards, there ain't no-where to hide...)

Do we hate money?

Absolutely not. This is ABSOLUTELY NOT some irksome 'statement' about the 'evils' of modern capitalism. Like we said, cram all known politics and ideologies fair up your puckers; like every writer and actor who ever wrote, strutted and fretted, we K-Players like money. See Dr Johnson. (Even here, in this text, we are writing for money, right? We are writing for money to burn.) Yes, we like 'capitalism' (what that? - ed.). Capitalism good. Capitalism OK Yank. Capitalism win Cold War ha-ha-ha die Commie pig-dog. This cyber-play, this cyber-theatre, this blogsite, the whole frigging web, modern computing in its gobsmacking entirety...all these contemporary play-writing tools only exist because some clever shit with a good idea had the funding and financing mechanisms of 'capitalism' at his disposal. Without The Money, even Shakespeare would have been rooted, right? So this is not some daft assault on no stinkin' 'global financial conspiracy', or whatever. If you're rich, bloody good luck to you (and lob some our way, too). If you're not, tough shit; neither are we, nor do we particularly wish to become so...unless naturally we can do this without 'compromising our artistic integrity' snicker snicker snicker.

So if you want to give us money to burn because you happen to hate dough and all who possess it, then be our guest. But leave us well out of any gob-shite arguments about the goods and bads of money. Money doesn't interest us, except in as much as its most excellent and historically-honourable capacity for funding the making of Art interests us. As, with what we feel is a commendable absence of the usual wanker-artist coyness, we hope will prove to be the case in this particular piece of un-performance Art. Without dough, performance artists, both real ones and un-ones like us, are generally fucked. Without your money to burn, we don't even get to try to be artists. Without your bit of luvvie luvverly, we're stuck with playing agonisingly-frustrated middle-class wanker wannabes, mere Turner Prize tossers, too. More: as with all genuine lasting great works of Art, in whatever field, we also know that even after you've larged up the dough, we would-be artists remain entirely in your hands. You make our art Art, not us. In our case, as with all plays, the audience makes our play real, not vice-versa. This scares us like you wouldn't fucking believe. We know that if nobody pays to watch our plays, we're just idiot fuckwits standing on an empty stage. Not artists at all. This frightens the living shit out of us.

So...we K-Players are not in fact sure yet if we're artists at all. We're just kinda typewriter-monkeyin' about with the Divine Human Comedy here. Trying to give contemporary word-based art a bit of a kick up the arse, maybe. Fucking with the Visual Art Scum, definitely. And the more mendacious word-tossers of modern politics, the Fourth Estate, The Academy, the endlessly-charming and inventive world of Celebrity PR, and so on. All in all, we're just after poking a few yappy word-wankers up the jacksy with a nice sharp theatrical cyber-quill. That's all. That's it.

But without a paying audience, most of all we're just jerks.

What you read here is what you get. Remember it. The text is the thang. Writers, we writers live and die every day and every hour and every fucking second by our words, and the truth with which we are able to charge them. Words are all we writers have. That's all we writers are. And words are only as powerful as the real truths that underpin them. The prettiest prose ever written means absolute shit unless it is linked meaningfully to the unwritten world, the stage beyond the page, yours (and ours in our down-time, too. All of us.). Most modern writers seem to have forgotten that other stage, we feel, and so in this cyber-play, when we K-Players write on the pagey cyber-stage that we are going to burn as much money as we can collect, then that is what we are going to do on the world stage, too. No spin. No tricks. No ironic games. For the pure sake of the Written Word, we will do what here we write we are going to do. We will burn your donations. As Human Beings, we think, therefore we are, therefore we can write...AND therefore we can act. And so we must act as we write, otherwise our written words mean nothing at all. And if our written words mean nothing at all, then why should any others mean anything, either? Shakespeare, Milton, Dante, the average Tate catalogue, the collected speeches of Rupie Murdoch, Mao's Little Red Book, Mills and Boon, Private Eye, Confucius (sp? - ed.)...well it's all just words innit. Blah and blah, signifying blah.

This, then, is a cyber-play about the power of written words to determine and drive human action in the real world. It's a play about words. It's a play about writing a script, and following it for real. That's all. We do not want to change the world. Give us two bucks (or whatever). We'll burn it, whether five or five million of you take us at our words. The end. That's our cyber-play. That's it. A modest little skit, but one which we feel is timely, one which we think might prove to be well worth Humanity funding at this stage in our collective creative evolution.

Because as Heine reminds us writers constantly, or should do, every time we care to stroll across the Bebelplatz looking down, as we writers should do once every day - the Written Word is being sort of kind of a little bit dangerously c**ted-up just now. We K-Players feel. Political spin, laboratory geekspeak, artful legalese, droning flak spack, endless spiralling irony, dead, unfunny 'satire' (as if satire is still possible in this permanently-satirical age), infinite self-referentiality...we mean, come on. Fuck's sake. Like Hamlet flogged this lame shit to death four centuries ago. It was cute first time round, maybe, but...like, you know, our only artistic tool - we writers, we written words - our solitary artistic weapon...is like a bit fucking worse for wear, these days. What with every other c**t fancying himself as Peter frigging Cook. Or whatever. You aren't taking any of this at face value for a second, right? So...where exactly are the writerly world's straight men these days? To be, or...just to take the piss to infinity? That is now the cyber-question. And it's as dull as fucking batshit, as cosmic questions go. Blah and blah, signifying boredom.

This - this un-performance global cyber-play - is the only literary mechanism by which we K-Players suspect the Written Word, such a cheap well-bored whore these days, can be re-injected with some kind of capacity for articulating unironic human truths. Don't get us wrong; we like a dead parrot as much as the next TV-pretend-paedophile. Sure we do. But just occasionally a good ironist needs to be serious too, you know? Like just every now and fucking then. K mean like, uh, you know, when we cleverly-ironic writers are all being 'ironic' all the fucking time, then like, uh, none of us can ever be truly, usefully fucking ironic. Ever. In our work. Ever again. Which leaves us all a bit bum-fucked and stranded on this cusp of the New Millennium. (Check our watches, cretins.)

So we K-Players are going to play straight man in this sketch. This cyber-play is a straight play. WYSIWYG. We are not ripping anyone off. You pays your money, and you gets to help make something that might just become something worth watching over the coming years. There are no stage tricks, here. You're just going to have to take our word for it. If we all work together as a global ensemble, it's not going to cost any of us more than a few bucks each to write this fucker, anyways. To write an unlikely New Millennium fairy tale, a necessary fiction that might help make life a bit more mysterious and fun and worthwhile for our kids, and our kids' kids, and so on, and so on. This is what we grown-up writers are supposed to do: make something real for our kids, out of nothing but our sublime Human imaginations. If you don't get what we mean, and/or you can't find it in yourself to stick with this prelude for any longer, lacking as it does the requisite (and brief) poetics, then fine. But go now. This cyber-play is not for you. Thanks heaps for reading this far.

Yeah, but who's 'we'?

Right. 'We' will be the K-Players. One plus seven anonymous cyber-luvvies plus a global company of credited paying extras, from everywhere on the planet. We hope. We mean, we really hope we can get this gig happening. But at the moment, we are just one of us. That is, we is just me, K. K'm the K Writer. (Actually, K'm only the K Writer's current agent, but let's keep it simple stupid for now. Literally.) If you want to scope this notion a bit, flesh out where K'm trying to come from (and go to), then read some Bloom and use your imagination. So K'm the wannabe K Writer's wannabe agent. Yep, bit embarrassing to put it so baldly, but K'm 'fraid the K-Players' writing slot is taken - yah boo sux snicker snicker chortle. But since the whole literary-celebrity-ego-trip first person personal pronoun thing is arse-fucked now - ie everyone now being famous and the author being long-dead and yada-yada-blah - it's hardly any great gig anyway. Nor is it an original idea, even. Bathsheba, Socrates, Homer, Will, Foo, whoever kicks off all these freakin' cyber-jokes these days...like K'm just another chickenshit scribbling functionary for just another chickenshit scribbling functionary here. A fucking IT clerk, for Chrissake. (There y'go, another fricking wordy nobody. K mean you know how the old Hollywood joke goes: the dumb blonde wannabe starlet who blows the writer to get ahead in the Biz, ha-ha-ha-yeah-right-the-writer-of-all-the-Human-Players.) Writers are a dime a frigging dozen, writers' agents are the worst kind of scum, and as you can see K'm no fucking simAmis in the timely deft literary irony stakes however you come at it. Nope, this creative writing business, this play-writing nonsense...it can nowadays only work properly as an ensemble effort.

Thus will we, the K-Players, need all the usual theatrical interlockings if we are going to create something larger than the sum of all our parts again. And some patience, and some adult human trust, and a good healthy unironic belief in the art of the collective possible. We're gunna need all that shit, that usual hold-hands-feel-the-energy-surge-luvvie-theatre shite, too. If this fucker is ever going to launch.

Give me men and women of cyber-parts...

The K-Players - Audition

Here's the rough plan, but we'll workshop it as we go so as to overcome the various - the obvious - production hitches. To get started, we - ie you and me and we, ie this global ensemble cyberplay, ie this blogsite and its lonely words - need a:

K-Producer, K-Director, K-Sound, K-Lights, K-Stage Hand, K-Romeo, and K-Juliet.

This being, in essence, a love cyber-play, for tomorrow's kids.

Yes, seven is a good number to start with, K feel. An apt number. (Some illiterate dipshits might call it an ironic number, but they'd be, like, missing the point...K mean it's right fricking there, between 'ironworks' and 'Iroquoian'; for frick's sake will youse all look it up already?!) So let's say seven. K need seven people, seven K-Players to fill the slots above, seven human beings with a sense of the art of the possible, seven anonymous people with no ego, seven supreme nobodies who give a shit about written words for the sake of the Written Word alone. And K need you to send me seven cheques. (Yeah yeah OK just wait.)

The amount is utterly irrelevant. The smaller the better, probably. It has to be cheques, because you need to be able to put a 'block' on them (if you want) until you're happy that you're not being stitched up by an embarrassingly gauche con-artist. And we need to start making a paper-chase. This all has to be accountable. You'll have to send your ante to me by post, because K need you to have my home address. That is, K need you to know where K physically live. Not a post office box, or a blind drop kind of thing, but my own house. My street. My city. My country. My planet. My galaxy. My Universe (etc.). And it will be all that. It won't be a dud address. K'll include proof of that. So no axe murdering maniacs or weirdo creep stalker-types, please. K mean that, please give me a break on this. No nutters. This is serious. (This is art!). As K mentioned, K'll also be giving the seven lucky K-Players copies of my driver's license, birth certificate, personal records and IDs...that is, whatever the fuck you want until you're convinced that K'm not some cheap spiv. We can chat by email at length. You can suss me out. Yeah, K'll want to suss you out, too. Obv.

But we'll never do lunch, darling. Beyond that said bit about axe murderers and weirdo creeps, K don't care too much who you are or what you do or even what you happen to believe in. K could give a fuck, really. If you happen to be a closet Trekky or an IT clerk or even a Thomas bloody Pynchon clone, then that will be aesthetically unfortunate, but essentially irrelevant and immaterial to this cyber-play. The K-Players will mean nothing more to this cyber-play than our real world acting out of the text; the fact of the play's words and their direct connection to the true life actuality those words collectively effect. (Relax, your parts are small and fairly painless and basically anonymous, too.) The text will be the thang, because the text will be enacted entirely off-cyber-stage, and proofed off-cyber-stage (in the luddite press), and thus the text - this text, these words - will remain isolated and value-free, but utterly real in its real world meaning. Like every lasting play ever written.

K need men and women of parts, goddammit. With big swinging dicks and piping hot twats.

K never want to meet my fellow K-Players. K do not wish to know you or become your friend or blah blah blah or whatever. K just need seven anonymously-interlocked, entirely-random and utterly-independent global collaborators for this cyber-play. Complete and permanent strangers to me, yet who know exactly where K live and who K am (and know how to keep their mouths shut about me, too), but not vice-versa and not each other. Production assistants who are each effectively, independently holding my balls in their hands, for reasons that K hope will be clear. The more real world respectable and vigourously-sceptical and instinctively-dismissive of this idea you are, frankly, the better. The less you give two short shits about me personally, the better, too. These roles require actorly discipline and professionalism on this matter like you've never known. Like most playwrights, K'm very fucking boring, my life is very fucking boring, and that's just the way K plan to keep it, thanks.

But whoever you are, from each of you K'll need a) an initial cyber-play investment, however small; b) some 'handle' or name or identifier that K can record publicly on this blogsite, and c) a return mailing address, preferrably a blind one (for your own peace of mind). K will also need you to be prepared to lodge a brief Private Eye classifed ad every now and then. Yes, it's a cost. Look, K'm covering production costs for now. It may become artistically-acceptable to fund these from our donations if we ever start to get serious bums on seats. Maybe. We'll have to be very careful with this, otherwise punters might smell a rat that doesn't exist.

Then what?

When K've got seven K-Players, and seven cheques, K'll lodge them in a bank account. K'll publish on this blogsite the K-Players' cyber-play cast (stage names, whatever) and their roles and the amounts each one lodged. K'll bung the cheques in the K-Players bank account, withdraw the amount, and burn it. K'll videotape the count and the burn, and then mail to each K-Player a copy of the bank statement and the video. My fellow K-Players, once (and only if) each is satisfied that K'm not bullshitting, will publish an ad in Private Eye smalls to confirm this, like so:

"K-Producer verifies Prelude", "K-Juliet verifies Prelude", and etc.

When all seven K-Players have lodged this ad, only then will the Paypal 'donate' curtain on this play-blogsite will be officially up - don't donate until K've announced the cast and the cast has verified the Prelude off-cyber-stage, otherwise you'll fuck the admin up a bit (tho' not fatally, K s'pose ie everything will still be accountable. K just wanted to set up The Money mechanisms before we got into the creative side, but the box office ain't open yet, and the last thing K need is to be fricking around with accounts while we're in casting/rehearsal). You're welcome to watch this audition for free. In fact you're welcome to watch this show for free, too. It might be a fucking dud. But once we are happening, feel free to donate away (we'll be doing out best to convince you that we're for real, here.) K'll be spruiking anonymously cyber-elsewhere; other K-Players can do likewise. Whatever. We may - MAY - be able to use some of the donations for advertising if things pick up. Again, we'll need to be very careful, and scrupulously, blog-publicly self-audited.

Once the cast is cyber-publicly announced and we're up and running, the only written words that will EVER there-after be added to this cyber-play's text will be the cyber-names of contributors and the amounts they donate to be burned, a running total, notification of burns, and strict accounting of ALL subsequent production 'costs' deducted (if indeed we go that way). The seven independent K-Players will control any such development; K'll just be a blog-functionary, an administrative hub, the text-scribe, the money-burner. If we're not all satisfied with any change to the practical management of the cyber-play's finances, then each K-Player has a veto.

The spruik - our call for K-Pax

Once this fucker is up and burning, the cyber-theatre doors will be open proper, and we're gunna need a lot of bums on seats. Cyber-play 'extras', tickets flogged to the greatest show on earth, the show of global human consciousness. Rocket fuel to help Humanity reach collective escape velocity at last, etc, etc, yada-yada. (Sorry, but K mean like the freakin' metaphors here are, like, freakin' endless. Sorry, we babble; luvvies can be such excitable fucking prats sometimes.) Actually, once our cyber-play is running, all we'll want is a few bucks from a lot of punters to make it go somewhere. What you get will be your cyber-handle recorded on the K-Pax passenger manifesto, K s'pose. Maybe a wry bemused chuckle or two. We WILL NOT rip you off. This is NOT NOT NOT a stupid cyber rip-off. It's just gunna have to be up to you to believe us. As usual, with plays. Unless you can suspend your sceptical disbelief (and risk blowing, like what, two bucks, or whatever...), then this won't work. It happens. It won't arse K much. K's un-cyber plays stiff all the time. (K is starting to think he simply lacks Talent.) Obviously we K-Players will work together to do our best to convince potential K-Pax extras that we are not ripping anyone off here, though, that this un-performance is worth a few bucks to help keep it running. If we fail, and this goes nowhere, then it's our fault. It's my fault. K's crappy agent's fault. K's agent's lack of Talent. That's cool. It means K'm not an artist. That's all. A heartbreaking tragedy for me personally, but big deal. K haves me health, an' all that.

K-Reviews - proofing the fiscal fuel burn

To amplify: the 'donate' button on this site deposits all donations into this site's Paypal account; K will then make routine transfers into the K-Players bank account. Everything will be paper-chased. We'll lose some admin costs to the banks and to Paypal, but all will be accountable and declared; K think it's worth The Money getting their cut out of this show (necessary production costs in this cyber-play). As noted, K will publish on this website a full running list of all donations made and who makes them, and also where this 'non-burned' dough goes. In regular 'Acts' K'll withdraw the bank account down to zero and burn the money, filming it and mailing, as per the Prelude burn, the videos and bank statements to each K-Player cast member. After each progressive 'Act', all seven K-Players will publicly validate the Act via Private Eye smalls.

As K said, we as an ensemble may eventually cover our costs from donations, but any and ALL 'production' costs will be publicly-declared on-site, and the fiscal proprieties included in each Eye smalls independent validation (like a routine audit ie K'll send copies of receipts for postage, video cassettes, advertising, whatever). K'll cover all these costs for the foreseeable future, until each of the seven K-Players agrees to any change, but...keep in mind that K'm not exactly a millionaire.

The K-Players Ensemble Contract

The cast will NOT be payed. What each cast member eventually does with their cassettes and bank statements is their business. If you think you're smart maybe you'll eventually make some deal with a TV doco mob, or a publisher, or whatever, if we start to rack up any eye-catching burn totals. If you're even smarter, maybe you won't, too, seeing as how any of us personally profiting from this un-performance ensemble piece will probably fatally compromise it. In a sense it doesn't really matter, perhaps, so long as K myself gets jack-shit out of this unperformance cyber-play. But in fact the bigger it gets, the harder it'll be for any of us K-Players to make that decision to milk it, to fuck it up by looking for a personal quid in it. In my view. The press ain't stupid these days. Still, the only requirement K absolutely insist upon from you is that the K-Players don't blow my anonymity. Like, ever, so long as K behave. K can NOT EVER PROFIT in any way from this cyber-play, either financially or in terms of public profile or whatever. That's the whole fucking point, right? K'm just a nobody functionary. What K get out of this is the kick of simply seeing how big we can make it. This - and here is the fundamental artistic premise of this un-perfomance piece - would also be the major motivation driving anyone to donate a few bucks to be burned. Creatively, K'm not after anything more than finding a fresh modern way to explore and celebrate and be utterly skull-fucked by this brilliant great cosmic play called the Divine Human Comedy. K mean let's just see what we can pull off. It's called 'art', or it used to be, and, like K said, the only way K can see that any of us word-artists will ever make real art now, is to work together as a trusting ensemble. So K really need seven people to work with me on this.

Trust me. K won't fuck you up. K really want this to work.

So if K-Players want K'll mail you a signed blank authorisation with my VISA card imprint on it. K'll mail you back your own initial fucking investment out of my own dough, even, as a kind of bond. If you want. Whatever it takes to get the ball rolling. We'll obviously be starting by burning tiny pissant amounts of dough, because presumably no-one in their right mind is going to believe that this play is for real. Until we make it so. Until - at least K hope until - we get a bit of a track record laid down. A few Acts verified. Working out in the chickenshit wilderness cyber-provinces of small figures burned, you could say.

Once the play starts, the seven K-Players will essentially hold the creative cards in this. Failure in your eyes on my part to comply strictly with the text - with these words K've just written here, with the spirit of this cyber-play - can shut the play down. It'll be up to the K-Players to safeguard the 'suspension of disbelief'. That's why you've got to know who K am, where K live, and have my balls firmly in your palms. You have to be able to fuck me up, big-time, if K fuck you or any other contributors up. Also, you'll be able to mildly fuck each other up - if one of your number fucks me up, or fucks our cyber-play up unfairly, then the others will, like, know. All this assumes that we manage to get a lot of 'paying' bums on seats, obviously. If it all stiffs, then K'm just a sad twat left a fair distance out of my own pocket.

Personally, K'd want this cyber-play to run and run and run and fucking run...can we burn a million quid? Two million? Ten? Infinity...

OK, so this is the rough basic artistic idea. If it sounds too complicated, then maybe it is. But the idea is about seeing just how much money we Human Beings are prepared to destroy solely for the sake of finding out how much money we're prepared to destroy. Here a buck, there a buck from the Globe's bemused but good-humoured cyber-theatre-going punters...if every Eye subscriber threw in a quid, there's two hundred fat torched just for starters, just for the fuck of it. Just for the fuck of it. Just because we can. Just because we choose to. Just because we put it in writing that we were going to.

Anyway, this shit interests me. K'd like to shit-shoot this idea, and brainstorm the flaws out of the practicals with like-minded cyber-luvvies and cyber-playwrights. Obviously the biggest problem is going to be proving to you (and everyone else) that K really did burn the dough in each Act. K suppose K can easily fake a video fire. K suppose K could easily flame counterfeit dough, too. And yes, K know that destroying currency on all the world's stage is technically illegal, but then so was saying 'fuck' on all luvviedom's stage less than, what, four decades ago? Illegal-schmillegal. Big bloody deal. If Humanity ain't free to destroy its own dough voluntarily, then it don't say much about the freedom of the 'free' market. (But remember - this is not an attack on money.)

There are technicalities to iron out. But the way K see it, by furnishing seven wholly random people with every conceivable detail they want (about me), we K-Players will go a long way to making it hard for me (or any of us) to rip this cyber-play off in any way. The ensemble's first task is to rig it up that way, anyway, set it all up as tightly and as cyber-publicly as is needed, to ensure that potential punters will feel confident that they aren't being stiffed by cyber-hustlers when they drop a couple of pennies in the rattle tin. That's the crucial technical staging probbers to overcome. Ideas welcome.

K dunno. Maybe it's a dud. Maybe it's complete bollocks. It wouldn't be the first artistic non-starter K ever came up with. This is just the basic idea. K'm keen to discuss it further with like-mindeds, fine-tune it, sharpen it up, eradicate the holes if others have additional cross-check suggestions to pitch in.

If you think K'm onto something, email me here. The worst thing that can happen is...nothing.

Ta for checking this out. Let's make a cyber-play. Let's cyber-talk. Let's make some real cyber-art, at last.

posted by J at 3:15 AM