Child’s Play

In these opening decades of a new millennium, we’re caught up in a maelstrom of rapidly transforming media technologies that can often be as bewildering as they are enthralling. So much so, in fact, that it’s easy to forget that this heavily visual world of ours is little over a hundred years old. The advent of cinema and then TV over the last century restructured our ways of interpreting and representing the environment around us. What perhaps has been lost over the last century or so is the fundamentally radical potential of books, and the immanent nature of the act of reading itself.

When the Books and Print call was issued, it challenged us to reconsider the relevance of traditional print media in our multifaceted and multisensory twenty-first century. By-now institutionalized objects, books can seem rather stolid markers of conventionality and conservatism—a half-millennium-old technology whose days are numbered and decline inevitable. However, books are not simply dry and dusty objects for study—instead, as all eight commissions for this Sandbox make clear, they remain living and dynamic cultural sites that enrich our lives in ways it’s impossible to quantify or contain.

As a writer working at the end of the nineteenth century, Robert Louis Stevenson was preoccupied with this tension. He was also living in a time of massive technological, economic and cultural change not dissimilar to that in which we find ourselves. For Stevenson, writing was neither profession nor pastime, but the very stuff of life itself. In his rich, sensitive and suggestive essay, ‘A Gossip on Romance’, he establishes the vital role that literary work plays in civil society:

Fiction is to the grown man what play is to the child; it is there that he changes the atmosphere and tenor of his life; and when the game so chimes with his fancy that he can join in it with all his heart, when it pleases him with every turn, when he loves to recall it and dwells upon its recollection with entire delight, fiction is called romance.

By interweaving the imaginative richness of traditional narrative with the immersive engagement of pervasive street games, Jekyll 2.0 aims to bring this ‘playful immanence’ (or romance) back into narrative. As the project’s subtitle suggests, we are seeking quite literally to embody a text—bring it to life so that the story of Stevenson’s Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde can be experienced as viscerally and immediately today as it was by his first readers in the 1880s.

It may be child’s play, but it will certainly be a challenge …