(Via RH‘s PhD thesis.)
From website:
Based in the UK, Reactor is a group of contemporary artists whose collective practice is focused on creating projects in which audiences become active participants. By developing situations that leave no room for the passive observer Reactor create work in which, rather than being forced, active engagement becomes the norm. Group dynamics and social interaction come to the fore, as participants immerse themselves in an unknown that invites risk-taking and a heightened sense of reality. The multilayered and social nature of the experience encourages diverse interpretations of the meaning of the work and emphasises the responsibility individuals have in forming collective perceptions of reality.
As described by former member Dave Bond:
Reactor began life as an exhibition of the same name, staged in September of 2002, in which all the artworks focused around the active participation of the audience. The exhibition took place in the same warehouse building that also housed our two separate studio groups of Graze and Aldaran, and when we found out the building was doomed to be demolished to make way for student flats the core members of both groups banded together and formed something new: Reactor.
Reactor was both a collection of artists who worked individually but also an organisation that worked collaboratively to stage events and exhibitions, continuing the original ethos of interaction and involvement with the audience.
This collaboration reached another level with the development of GHAOS: where previously we had generally worked individually on our own elements of Reactor projects, GHAOS projects were created entirely as a group under the sole authorship of Reactor. GHAOS methodology evolved an exuberant and darkly comic attitude, entwining complex systems with elaborate wordplay, often confusing and manipulating the audience but simultaneously encouraging them to involve themselves in the bizarre fantasies presented to them to make the leap from being passive spectators to ‘GHAOS Actors’. In October 2005 this cumulated in the event Total GHAOS: a totalitarian utopia ruled by the Reactor Party under the principles of GHAOS.
Post-GHAOS and following a period of assessment, Reactor decided to maintain the group practice and develop less frequent but more complex, large-scale events. Continuing to misdirect and confuse audience perceptions, initially under the secret identity of Ivan’s Dogs, a fake artists group from Northern Ireland, and then going on to develop events exploring social and group dynamics and psychological experimentation in The Geodecity Project and The Tetra Phase.