abstract
With the scarcity of creative jobs in a society increasingly mesmerized by AI, artists are forced to scrape and claw and compete for every opportunity.
Artists are expected to pander to gallery owners, egomaniacal professors, and dopamine-addicted followers on the inescapable stage of social media.
Artists are reduced to selling themselves—their bodies, their blood, their sweat and tears—in a Sisyphean cycle of chasing relevance, meeting expectations, and balancing ingenuity with mass appeal.
In a world where artists must devote all their time, resources, and creative output to simply surviving on mediocre pay and back-breaking hours, what is privilege worth? What do your dreams cost? And how much would you sacrifice to afford your purpose in life?
What if the price of success was your art itself? Would you surrender the integrity of everything you sought to accomplish, the very thing you traded your soul to create? At what point do you stop being an artist, and become something else altogether?
This summer, join nineteen of your fellow students for the highly exclusive, invitation-only Annual Artist’s Retreat hosted by the two least ethical and most successful professors at Georgia College of Art & Design (GAD—or GCAD, depending on who you ask).
Upon arrival, you will be prompted to create a work of art in a discipline outside your own, which will be judged at the weekend’s conclusion. Brace yourself for a fierce competition that will define your career before it has even begun, as you relearn how to collaborate with and trust your opposition in the face of everything that seeks to divide you.
Lose yourself in the many creeks and meadows of Conasauga valley as you experiment with new mediums, explore physicality and the tangled connections between kindred competitors, and question the cost of creation in a world that seeks to commodify you.
Premise
Vanitas is a 3-day, 20-player, slice-of-life larp about artistic creation, connection, and the societal barriers—such as competition, commodification, and late-stage capitalism—that hinder us from both.
The story is set at the start of an annual artist’s retreat deep in the Georgia wilderness, which only the highest-achieving students at GCAD are invited to attend. The retreat was established to offer students the time, space, and resources to devote themselves to the creation of a great work of art. However, the retreat’s original mission has warped over the years under the limited supervision and tyrannical guidance of the faculty, eventually morphing into a high-stakes competition to evaluate a student’s long-term artistic viability and potential.
Upon arrival, students are provided with a prompt for the project they must create. How each student answers the prompt will determine not only how well they do at the Georgia College of Art & Design, but in the art world at large: being awarded a coveted industry referrals—or even simply impressing their impossible-to-please professors—can guarantee a young artist success in their career post-graduation.
Meanwhile, failing to fulfill the prompt or meet the soul-crushing expectations of the faculty can have the opposite effect, resulting in the worst fate imaginable to any aspiring artist: a first-class ticket to a pencil-pushing desk job. Or, more likely, Baristaville.
This year, the students will discover an unexpected twist in the requirements: in order to qualify for the competition, each student must submit a work of art outside of their trained art form. While a project may utilize skills or elements of the individual’s preferred art form, it must consist largely of the elements and instruments of an art form they have never previously explored. The art forms of their peers and competitors, of course.
This larp is diegetic, meaning minimal meta techniques will be used and what you see is what you get. We aim to be as fully immersive as possible by limiting off-game breaks and utilizing opt-out mechanics to communicate boundaries and comfort levels while remaining in character. The game will run continuously over two days with no designated off-game time, and players will be expected to eat, sleep, and embody their characters for the full duration.
Disclaimer: the use of AI for any manner or aspect of artistic creation is strictly banned at this larp. Violations of this policy will result in a ban from all future Secret Garden Studios events and larps.