Fish, Chips, Cup O'Tea

Fish, Chips, Cup O’Tea is an interactive performance exploring unreliable narration, audience agency, and generative storytelling. Framed as a surreal game show, the work invites the audience into a live co-created narrative shaped by participation, computational process, and deliberate ambiguity.

Each audience member receives a postcard of London, randomly marked with “Fish,” “Chips,” or “Cup O’Tea.” The distribution is uneven, with “Cup O’Tea” appearing most often. These cards seem to influence the structure of the performance — though at times the rules are knowingly undermined. In at least one scene, the outcome is fixed regardless of which card is drawn.

Blending truth, fabrication, and uncertainty, the piece nods to the figure of the unreliable narrator — but also to the unreliability of wider systems that claim fairness while quietly predetermining outcomes. Humour and absurdity mask something grittier underneath: questions of belonging, class, and the structures that shape who gets to play, and on what terms.

No two performances are alike: each iteration builds a temporary participatory community, balancing humour, intensity, and provocation.

Technically, the system was built in Max/MSP and designed for real-time performance. Custom-coded visuals (via Gen on the GPU) and audio (running on the CPU) allow the entire piece to run efficiently on a single laptop. Voice input is analysed with FFT and amplitude data to manipulate contrast, saturation, and playback speed, while controlled randomness introduces variation. Sound and visuals are tightly integrated, with a Novation APC40 custom-mapped to trigger events and manipulate audio live.