It's hard to imagine two more different worlds than contemporary British art, with its avant-garde white spaces and laconic gestures, and British theatre, with its continuing addiction to narrative and social critique. Since their formation in 1984, theatre group Forced Entertainment have tried everything to bridge this gap, from taking an audience on a coach tour of Sheffield to presenting a 24-hour "durational performance" at last year's London International Festival of Theatre. How about an arty computer game pro jected large as life at Sheffield's Site Gallery?
The city centre is empty, except for someone slumped under a lamp post in the street lights' amber glow. This is not a time and a place you want to be in. The only escape is by touching the body, which leads you to another city street at night, graphite, a wooden door daring you to open it... This is Nightwalks, an interactive art work on CD-rom, directed by Tim Etchells and photographed by Hugo Glendinning, in which members of Forced Entertainment act out some terrible yet unexplained scenario in desolate urban settings at dead of night.
Across the road from the gallery, the silver drum shapes of Nigel Coates's National Centre for Popular Music lend Sheffield's cultural quarter a... well, you wouldn't call it glitz. Coates's architecture is emblematic of a changing sense of the city: it seems to mime the excitements of virtual space. Meanwhile at the Site Gallery, virtual space imitates the desolation of a real British city. Nightwalks was photographed in London and Sheffield; the alleys, flats, graveyards and car parks are in some imaginary yet grittily authentic Britain. Sex, murder, dubious transactions - it's all happening down these hyperreal mean streets. But what makes Nightwalks - along with its sister pieces Frozen Palaces and Spin, shot respectively in a Georgian townhouse and a junkyard - so unhealthily entertaining is the way it implicates you.
Glendinning has shot a series of 360-degree panoramas in which people bleed, scream, hold seances. They are frozen like statues for you to move around, zoom in, move back for a better view. The actors play murderers, the murdered, and a pantomime horse. It's a game, and one in which they are setting you up as the Hitchcockian film director, or just a psychotic voyeur. The tableaux are full of narrative details that never gel into a "story" - there is an analogy with paintings such as Hogarth's Rake's Progress. They are also full of loaded iconography, but it's impossible to tell which scene comes first, what the story is. Your effort to do so becomes the narrative; your urge to see compels you from scene to scene. You are the sinister presence in these rooms and streets. It is your shadow glimpsed on a rainy street at 4am, your invisible presence moving silently and smoothly towards a weeping figure sitting alone in a midnight car park.
There's humour here too, a Grand Guignol quality to these scenarios. If the experimental theatre work dries up, Forced Entertainment have a great future as a kind of HammerStudios.com.
Artists who work with new media tend to be optimists, even utopians, like the Danish group Superflex who are gradually creating an exact double of the Swedish city of Karlskrona on the internet, arguing that in this virtual space Karlskrona's citizens will be able to negotiate new social relationships. By contrast the virtual world created by Forced Entertainment is not utopian at all; it is a murky replica of contemporary Britain and it chills your blood. Their exercises in video art are less interesting, because they seem to retreat to a more humanist, emotional style, but the fictional British city of Nightwalks is a dreadful, alluring place. You wouldn't want to live there but you probably do.
