Moving Forest expands the last 12 minute of Kurosawa’s adaptation of Shakespeare’s Macbeth, ‘Throne of Blood’ (1957), into a performance and broadcast saga with a prelude of 12 days and a scripted 12 hour live performance. It is multi-artist, multi-site, multi-media, harnessing crowd-sourcing & mobile technology in London and beyond.

Moving Forest, presented as a work by the collective AKA the castle, brings together commissioned and self-assigned acts and actions realized by diverse visual/sonic/electronic/digital/performance artists, writers, singers, coders, hackers, mobile agents, twitters, networkers and the general public.

Moving Forest maps an imaginary Castle and a camouflaged forest revolt onto the modern day metropolis. Derived from Shakespeare by way of Japan’s most respected film director Kurosawa, Moving Forest brings the classic play into the hyper-playground of London city on the eve of Olympics2012. Moving Forest expands Throne of Blood’s last minutes into 60, generating a sustained 12 hour event mixing performance, sound art, visual expression, media transmission, intervention and interaction between numerous performers and the general public. The event takes place not only in designated locations and with dispersed units across the city, also virtually on the internet with audio/video streams.

Inside the castle, classic and contemporary tales of omen, remorse, betrayal and overthrow unfold. Each act is realized by collaborating visual, sound and performance artists making use of all mediums, elaborating operatic manoeuvre into an escalating scheme of conspiracy and its contemporaneous political manifestations

Outside the castle, the mobile forest, electronically updated with antennas, electronic magnetic waves, geolocation, armed with bytes and pixels, signals and slogans, is assembled for simulated insurgency measures. Mobilized urbanites, empowered by free network emissions, carry the camouflage tree antennas, in a spider-shaped movement, towards the Castle Central. As the sheer strength of signals forces an entry into the Castle, a final merging of forest and castle occurs; a moment of downfall, jubilation and loss.