An account of The Tetra Phase assembled from sections of experiences of Lawrence Bradby, Sorcha Carey, Samuel Mercer, Ilana Mitchell and John Plowman:

Tetra is ancient Greek for four... but it also refers to a type of tropical fish - highly suitable for a project that puts its participants in a goldfish bowl.
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Even before the event I had Stanley Milgram's famous Yale experiment about obedience and authority in my mind. Certainly since the event I have been thinking about Tetra Phase in this context. "The social psychology of this century reveals a major lesson: often it is not so much the kind of person a man is as the kind of situation in which he finds himself that determines how he will act." (Stanley Milgram 1974)
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At 3pm, a face peered around the heavy wooden door. A quick scan of the five of us, then a puzzled look, and an apology - someone hadn't turned up, we needed to wait. Finally in - checked in bag, handed boiler suit, ticked off as number five on the list of...five?...in my time slot. We weren't waiting for anyone that had booked a place, then. So who were we waiting for?
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The cloakroom functioned as a sort of airlock. Leaving my watch and phone there, and accepting the uniform, loosened the fit of my usual persona and eased me through the embarrassment of joining in. 'The Tetra Phase' used none of the familiar framing devices to point out who was a performer, yet it was continually performative. The dividing line (between audience and performer) was not spatial but informational - those who knew what was coming next, and those who didn't.
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I was asked to cover my eyes; there were no blindfolds, unfortunately, we'd have to make do like this. His hands on my shoulders, the guide led me round in a circle and into a cell, where I uncovered my eyes and donned my regulation attire. I rejoined my group and we were formally inducted to The Tetra Phase.
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The safety lecture was another overt performance. It was delivered via a self-consciously inept ventriloquist act using a decorated pumpkin who represented 'The Station Commander.' As he spoke in a squeaky trans-Atlantic voice, the staff member wobbled the pumpkin. The awkwardness of this performance made our group suddenly conscious of each other's reactions: should we laugh, ask him to stop, pay attention to the content and not the form? I opted to avoid everyone's gaze by looking at the ceiling.
--

All the secrecy can generally only amount in a fair bit of disappointment, while using 'the audience as artwork' I often wondered whether we were doing what was expected of us, or how we were doing.

As an example, the zombie project, where our group split into different rooms where other groups were on their own challenges. I wasn't allowed to focus on anybody, yet I felt like they should be thinking about what I was doing there. When, a couple of hours later, a zombie came into our room and did the same task, it felt like a battle between us and him, us both believing we had more knowledge of the other side, but not being 100% sure of what he had been told before entering.
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I was in a group of five from which Dom had been picked at random. While he waited behind a heavy polythene curtain, the rest of us were shown into a neighbouring room and told to prepare a surprise birthday party for him. There were several cardboard boxes containing bunting, balloons, party poppers, hats, pre-opened bags of crisps. There was a radio, a disco light, and a mini-fridge with bottles of pop and a cheap Swiss roll, this last also already opened. We had ten minutes, so hurriedly began to untangle the bunting. Apart from a clock on the far wall and the CCTV camera over the door, the room was completely bare. There were no tacks or tape or blue tack, so we were jamming the bunting into cracks behind the dado rail, and winding it round the window catches. When one of the members of staff came back in leading the nominal birthday boy, we cheered enthusiastically and fired the party poppers over his head.

Our absorption in the (party) game kept us in the present, responding to our immediate social and physical surroundings: our equal status as participants in the event, our presence in a derelict building where every clock showed a different time. The party was contrived. A birthday party should be planned with love and attention, and we had just staged one to order. It wasn't even his birthday, so in fact we were performing what we knew a party should look like. But this was precisely the point in the day where our group relationship shifted; from a collection of amused strangers playing along with the instructions, we coalesced into a group with a developing ethic of cooperation.

There was a crucial difference between our party games and the wider event that they took place within, namely our continual uncertainty about the limits of the latter. As participants, we were never sure of the overall structure and ethos of 'The Tetra Phase', so we had no 'fixed rules' and our engagement had to be modified continually.
--

I'm not sure anything after this ran smoothly. In our five tasks something was always wrong - technology, props, timing, staffing. Something that did matter, but not a lot - something we probably wouldn't have noticed, had its absence not been acknowledged. Complex schedules were referred to, scripts were lost. Our guides apologised again and again, but also seemed unperturbed; it was a job, there were problems, but it was getting done.
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Reactor continue (the) tradition of creating situations for people to inhabit. The difference is that they wish to exercise minute control over the situations they initiate. As participants in 'The Tetra Phase' we did not see any of the CCTV footage or learn about any of Reactor's observations. We just knew we were being observed. Thus Reactor position themselves as an amalgam of technocratic fixers, psychic bureaucrats and high priests of a concealed social science.

Another way the 'wider perspective' was restricted was through sustained confusion about why we were competing, and who against. Our first task gave us a taste of this. In a small room with faded floral wallpaper, an staff member wearing a giant Lego-man head used an overhead projector to give us a quick glimpse of the plans of The Tetra Phase temple.

Then he emptied some Lego bricks onto a card table, switched on a techno tape, and told us we had ten minutes to build a replica model - 'you've got all the bits you need there.' With some surreptitious peeking at the plans we completed our temple. Our staff member held up another model, (to be quite frank, a far weaker effort than our own): 'here's how it should've turned out.'

At this stage we merely thought it odd, or badly explained, but during another task, towards the end of our five-hour stretch, we realised there might not be any competition at all. The task was a version of the tangram puzzle. We were each given four cardboard shapes, with the aim of each assembling square. We were asked to work without any communication.This meant that we could only receive the next piece we needed if it was offered, as we could not request it in any way. The competitive element was the video link to another group somewhere else in the building. It would be a race between the two groups. This was clearly a real-time contest: we could see that with our own eyes. When we finished in under five minutes we congratulated each other loudly, analysed the moves, talked down the various unintentional ways we'd bent the rules.

Once all that subsided we focused on the video link again. Not only were they still unfinished, they all had their heads down, and not one was looking to see what their teammates needed. One man was patiently trying to fit a square into a triangular gap. Had they been doped? Were they letting us win? If our victory was faked, then why?
--

Everything about the experience (or my experience at least, since this was "an immersive journey into the subjective") made you feel that you were participating in a vaguely sinister experiment, from being led blindfold to an empty police cell to strangely mundane activities undertaken as a group (bell ringing, counting beans).
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...having reached 'the next level,' it was time to go. Wait! Haven't you forgotten the other thing? Oh yeah, can some one give us some audience feedback? I was least undressed, and l wasn't so keen to rush away - it didn't feel over. I went back upstairs and met a girl in the control centre. The only non-boilersuited person in the space, she too was apologetic - the CCTV system - the control centre I was introduced to - was a blank green screen. The model of the rooms showed no detail other than windows and doors - and a set up much bigger than the one we had experienced. Her questions threw me without the support of my gang, getting more and more absurd, there was no tension alleviation. I couldn't tell if my questioner knew what answers I might give, and she gave no encouragement of my answers. I felt like apologising - I probably did. This was the only time I felt the presence of someone other than us in the building, of something bigger than our afternoon experience.
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For several days afterwards, I had a strange headache, and my colleague, a fellow participant, complained of feeling empty. We put our symptoms down to our visit, and concluded that Tetra Phase had stolen our souls.