Please contact us
with corrections
or breaking news
Alternate Reality Game Stars in Doc by Doniphan Blair
(lf-rt) Spencer McCall director of the movie about the Jejune Institute, Jeff Hull, creator of Jejune, and Uriah Finley, sound and tech support for Jejune. photo: D. Blair
With reality games and television shows all the rage for almost two decades, perhaps it is no surprise someone decided to up the ante, take it offline and into the streets for a fully immersive and analog experience. Nor was I that surprised it happened in Oakland, as I learned from Spencer McCall's fascinating new feature documentary "The Institute".
Severe shock did kick in, however, when it dawned on me that the guy who started papering Oakland with esoteric flyers and luring people into a possible cult was none other then my old neighbor and friend, the seemingly mild mannered graphic designer, Jeff Hull who started the art group Nonchalance and now-famous clothing outlet Oaklandish.
Similarly astounded, but for different reasons, was McCall, a twenty-something SF State graduate who, although not in the media department, got into corporate and music video making. He started to hear about Hull's project because, although "I live in the city," he told me by phone, "Oakland is like my surrogate home. I am always over there, my friends are all over there."
Aside from "The Institute", which just screened for cast, crew and participants at the Grand Lake Theater, Oakland, on April 21, McCall's only online presence is "Suspicion" (2011), a music video of five young people dancing on a beach and then turning into demons and exploding. Seems only fitting.
"What really drew me in," McCall said, "was the narrative Jeff was trying to get participants to engage in. What caused other people to be find it so compelling? It was actually based on some truth, some experiences in his life that were a little creepy, a little weird. Jeff ended up going to a treatment facility in Marin when he was younger and it was very cult-like. It inspired a lot of the project."
From 2008-2011, as many as 9,000 people decided to go to 580 California, in San Francisco's financial district, ride the elevator to the 18th floor, enter an unattended but automated one room office and get "inducted", paying nothing but their credulity.
McCall integrates a bunch of cute animation into the artifacts of the Jejune Institute: here a character investigates a Jejune graphic. image: courtesy of S. McCall
"The group doing this is called the Jejune Institute. [It was] founded in 1962 by a bunch of Bay Area academic hippie-cowboys led by Stanford’s Octavio Coleman, Esquire," Oakland filmmaker Elijah Wolfson blogged breathlessly in 2009.
"An outrageous blend of art, science, [and] new-age-ology, they offer a range of super strange services and products ranging from 'polywater,' H2O that has been condensed through quartz capillary tubes, to the Aquatic Thought Foundation, which studies dolphin-to-human communication," not to mention the "memory to media center," a mind to digital image transfer system, the "Moonlight Menagerie," the animal adoption center, where you can pay to rescue anything from an ant to an elephant, and the piece de resistance, The Algorithm.
"A small mobile device that travels with you wherever you go[,] when conflict arises, as it most certainly will, The Algorithm is there to intervene and right the potential wrong before it even takes place" according to the still extant Jejune Institute site. By the way, "jejune" means "naive, simplistic, and superficial," kind of a giveaway at the get-go.
Like Paul in pursuit of his Christ, McCall has fashioned a similarly over-the-top and mysterious documentary, although, in keeping with the Jejune spirit, almost all is explained in the end.
"It is not like 'Spinal Tap' [1984], which is a mockumentary with no elements of truth," Hull told me about the movie, although he just as easily could have been referring to his Jejune Institute. "It's not mocking anything, it is just taking liberties. I look at it as the godchild to 'Exit Through the Gift Shop' where you get to the end of the movie and you are not sure where the [reality] line is."
"This documentary is about an art project that blurs the lines between reality and fiction," McCall said. "My goal in creating the documentary about it was the same."
"Another thing that drew me to this project, is they had created so much media [and] I could use all the footage and other assets they had gathered over the years. A lot of the heavy lifting was already done. I didn't spend more than $2000 for production, and post was done at night where I work—although Jeff kicked some to cover color correction and final mixing."
McCall gets some nice mystical imagery, replicating the feel of the Jejune experience. image: courtesy of S. McCall
"This is something very new and unique. I tried to approach it from the perspective of someone who knows absolutely nothing about the concept of an alternate reality game and has limited understanding of lunatic fringe activities or conspiracies. I think it is very accessible, it does its job of easing people into this concept which is more then the creators of Nonchalance [the team behind Jejune] can say. They just threw you into the middle of it [and you had] to make the best sense of it you could."
Although the trailer has been criticized as too confusing, "It is just a marketing tool to drive some intrigue," McCall said. "We weren't really experimental with any thing. [The film] is pretty straight forward, not slow, it is a straight forward A-to-B film."
"To those dark horses with the spirit to look up and see… a recondite family awaits," was one of the Jejune Institute's many repeated catch phrases—"Elsewhere" was another—that tread that line between cultish obfuscation and enlightened truth. Another is the use of complex narratives, notably about a very creative young woman, Eva, who supposedly lived at Hull's house for a month in 1988 and then disappeared.
Although Hull comes down on the side of transparency, humanity and even normalcy—albeit only in the end—along the way, he was determined to test your will, comprehension and adventurousness while baiting your curiosity and mystical machismo. How else did he get hundreds to slog through the two-year plus search and Situationist street theater to the final debriefing, which ended with explanations, cookies and laughter.
It all seemed incredibly real at first: "the use of metaphysics, mind sciences, and other nontraditional systems," for which "the Institute has developed an astonishing array of patents." While in other reality games or shows, you are informed, you sign a contract, you see the cameras, in this alternate reality game (or ARG), participants entered unknowingly by engaging in a service, school, protest or apparent cult.
ARG started with Philip Price's "AR: The City" in 1985, according to Wikipedia, although other sources say it was "Dreadnot", produced by the San Francisco Chronicle, 1996. Like the Jejune Institute, the latter included working voice mails, clues in code, and real locations and people (like then-mayor Willie Brown). The main difference being the "G" in ARG: the Jejuners didn't know they were playing.
Poster for the documentary 'The Institute'. image: courtesy of S. McCall
"As far as I can understand from investigating this for a year," McCall said, "[Hull's] early intention was to set up a company that specializes in viral marketing campaigns," making the Jejune Institute a massive beta test. "You see it in a lot of movies these days, a viral marketing campaign to immerse fans into the subject. One of the first ones was for 'Artificial Intelligence' [Steven Spielberg, 2001]." "The Blair Witch Project"'s marketing, 1999, also resembled an ARG while film itself similarly blurred the reality line.
"What Nonchalance set out to achieve [was] more concerned with art than business and they were unable to sustain it," McCall continued. "As a company, it trickled away," although it now appears that Hull may parlay it into future functionality, perhaps as a motivational tool, a therapy or a visionary mystical game, akin to Herman Hesse's similarly amorphous, "The Glass Bead Game".
Academics have looked at ARGs to self-organize groups like businesses, nonprofits or schools, capitalizing on the new media and role playing to further collective problem solving. Of course, the Jejune Institute is the essence of the new media, previously called multimedia, and now labeled transmedia. The first Transmedia Film Festival will be held in the Bay Area October 12 and 13 at the Yerba Buena Center for the Arts in San Francisco, Trans Bay Fest, and it is possible that "The Institute" will be opening night.
"It is a really bizarre new form of art," noted McCall. "It was not something you observe. You can't really walk away like a movie where you can leave the theater and are safe. It ended up bleeding into a lot of peoples' lives. They were getting text messages and phone calls and even letters and packages delivered to their homes. And they were never fully explained why, what the point of any of this was. And they were never charged any money—for anything!"
"Obviously there are things about religion that are great and things that are really oppressive," observed Hull. "But you don't need to throw out the baby with the bath water. Where is ritual in our society? Where is initiation? Where are people finding meaning? We consider ourselves so cynical and independent of those things but I want to bring them back. I would like to have ritual, initiation, the transfer of meaningful content to one another in some sort of formalized way, even if it is a self-knowing formalized way."
The crew showing for 'The Institute' indicates the immense diversity of the almost 10,000 people who participated at one time or another. photo: D. Blair
He certainly succeeded with the Jejune Institute, starting with old media (telephone pole fliers with a pull off phone numbers), escalating into the rather official induction in a fancy San Francisco office and then launching into scavenger hunts, protest marches and meetings sometimes involving hundreds of people. It would have seemed cult-like if it weren't so confusing, although it was also extremely together with fantastic graphic design and technology, radio broadcasts, mystical ideas, and tightly produced events.
Hard to know what one does for an encore in this case: Hull seems to have a project pending although he wouldn't say; McCall says he is exhausted from the ordeal and, beyond doing the festival circuit, has banished all thoughts of another film.