Red Nose Dribble
Red Nose Day is a UK-wide institution and a key component of the Comic Relief initiative. Everyone is encouraged to cast their inhibitions aside and do something quirky to raise money for deserving causes.
Red Nose Dribble was created in partnership with regular collaborators ICDC to enable the public to participate in a multi-site play experience against other cities in the North West and mark the day as being a little different.
Created in Flash by Onno Baudouin, it presented an assortment of red noses of different sizes upon the big screen. Members of the public were allowed entry into a fenced area, up to a dozen at a time, and had to work together to use their bodies to push the spheres toward each other. When two noses touched, the pair morphed and increased in size – the goal being to join all of the noses to create one giant snout.
Red Nose Dribble from Bren O'Callaghan on Vimeo.
Each completed screen classed as a single point, which was then registered upon a live scoreboard before repopulating the screen with more noses. The Big Screens in Liverpool, Leeds and Bradford were playing simultaneously, fuelling a sense of inter-city competition as strangers banded together in common purpose – citizen alpha v citizen beta - edging ahead or falling marginally behind. This reluctance to lose extended the event well beyond the planned period of operation.
Players of all ages and backgrounds worked together and developed strategic methods as they went along: from positioning less able players in the corners to act as human pinball flickers, to the ‘British Bulldogs’ sweeper approach whereby all the noses were swept to one side and squashed together by a determined rush of force. Advice and instructions were passed verbally between exiting and incoming players, with on-screen text kept to a minimum.
A secondary but no less effective source of entertainment was not the screen but the participants themselves. Just as many eyes were fixated squarely upon those taking part, stepping into the plimpsolls of mime artists as they attempted to grapple with invisible objects, instead of watching the screen itself – confirming that the platform is an effective tool in soliciting collective experience rather than solely a means of ambient display.
