We find Luther Blissett
at an hotel in Abu Dhabi

Well, over the past couple of years I’ve been doing mostly contracting. Contracting, and sultancy.

Certainly. Contracting is a school of performance art. It's sometimes known as 'office theatre'. The word itself comes from the idea of contra-acting, that is, of playing - or being - yourself.

In essence, it's very simple. Every exit is an entrance. Somewhere else. You get up in the morning, put on your costume and enter the performance space. If it's office theatre, you go to the space, meet the other players and, to a greater or lesser extent, improvise a situation with them. The dialogue is entirely circumstantial, it's really about attitude. But I’ve been concentrating more on the manipulation of props than dialogue, myself.

Well, it depends on the type of prop. Offices frequently contain computers, so I’ve been pushing the keys on the keyboards and moving the mice around. Again, contracting is less concerned with what you're doing than how you're doing it, and you've really just got to feel it rather than think about what you're doing too much.

Yes - I had to unlearn a lot of what I thought I knew about communication. I really began to understand spoken communication when I realised it was a form of mime, so I tend to look at dialogue now as a type of dance, concentrated on facial shapes. The way I think of it now is, I make sounds with my face.

Quite positively, on the whole. Most of them really can't tell the difference. For example, I’ve found that if you hold the inside of your face in a certain way, and squeeze your chest, it sets up vibrations which, in various ways, gives rise to particular responses in the other players. But the interesting thing is, the whole effect really has more to do with what you look like and how you move than what you say.

It's quite surprising in a way. Most of the people you interact with don't understand this. If you're playing the role of, say, a technical consultant, it's more important to look like and behave like your own conception of what you'd be like if you really were one, rather than to actually do what people expect a technical consultant to do. Because nobody really understands what that is, and again, contracting is about being yourself.

Sultancy is the opposite of consultancy, which is where certain people, who frequently are contractors, give their opinions to a third person.

Precisely. It's a different type of dialogue, because this person is qualitatively different from the consultants themselves, because sultancy is the inversion of consultancy. The sultan's role is to act as a foil for the consultants, to engage their attention and focus (or defocus) their movements on a particular idea. In a sense, the sultan is the leader of a sort of ritual dance.

People often say that sultans are born, not made, but I’ve found that this isn't necessarily true. Elvis impersonators, for example, would argue that sultancy - they don't use that particular word, of course - they say that it's a calling, that if one's heart is focussed and pure, sultancy is within the reach of anyone, regardless of circumstances.

Well, for many people it's part of an anti-art initiative. You engage in these contra-actual modes of behaviour and interestingly enough, you can actually quantify at the end of the month how effective you've been towards that end.

Absolutely. Most artists claim that art is about quality and not quantity and generally that's true. The corollary of this is that anti-art activities, such as contracting, are difficult, if not impossible, to judge qualitatively, but if your act is good, your bank balance goes up.

There is - there are overheads that must be met. Contracting is particularly vulnerable to hidden costs, which ironically are caused by the fact that you're working in an anti-artistic medium. You tend to end up purchasing the creativity of others, rather than gaining satisfaction from being purchased yourself. Make no mistake, arts and anti-arts like contracting use the same skills, but I’ve found that you need a balance, which is why I’m here now.

De rien, thank you.