Do you ever envision a life in which your sole responsibility, your singular purpose, your immense privilege was to create art?
Have you ever longed for empty, unending days, filled only by brushstrokes and breakthroughs and beautiful moments?
Does your body ever ache for this imagined world free from the constraints of capitalism?
Every artist arriving at Wit’s End knows true artistic freedom is a fantasy.
But for a few days, you’ll be able to live out that dream. For these three days, you can experience for yourself whether the price is worth the profit.
Story
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, what is privilege worth? What do your dreams cost? What if the price of success was your art itself?
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 the Georgia College of Art & Design.
Lose yourself in the many creeks and meadows of Conasauga valley as you experiment with new mediums, explore the tangled connections between competitors, and question the cost of creation in a world that seeks to commodify you.
Premise
Vanitas is a three-day, 20-player larp about artistic creation, connection, and the societal barriers—such as competition, commodification, and late-stage capitalism—that seek to stifle the creative spirit.
The story is set at the start of an annual artist’s retreat, which only the highest-achieving students at the Georgia College of Art & Design 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, to be judged at the weekend’s conclusion. How each student answers the prompt will determine not only how well they perform at GCAD, but in the art world at large. The awarded coveted industry referrals can guarantee a young artist success in their career post-graduation.
In order to qualify for the competition, each student must submit a work of art outside of their trained art form. The art forms of their peers and competitors, in fact.
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.
Is This Larp for Me?
This larp is for you if you like the idea of
- Spending two days fully immersed in a character
- Experimenting with art and its many mediums
- Facing the moral quandaries of a young artist agonizing over how to profit from their art without relinquishing their soul to the “system”
- Navigating the complicated feelings of competition, self-comparison, and rivalry that society breeds between artists
- Contending with the financial privilege required to be a full-time artist
- Connecting and collaborating with fellow artists
- Losing your entire fucking mind in the woods attempting to capture the ephemera that is art and beauty
This larp is not for you if you
- Don’t like art or the idea of making art in-game
- Are not comfortable with the prospect of failure or mediocrity. For most characters, failure will be an inevitable—possibly unavoidable—aspect of this larp
- Don’t enjoy long, slow freeform games largely guided by character exploration, fraught interpersonal dynamics, and a shared yet individual mission
- Secretly hate us