Data Bodies and the Awesome Apparatus of Technology

Super Vision, a multimedia theatre collaboration by The Builders Association and dbox, directed by Marianne Weems, text by Constance De Jong. BAM Next Wave Festival, New York City, November 29–December 3, 2005.

The Builders Association has un-dertaken a daunting and coura-geous task: to spin from the force field of global computer technologies an alternative technological world, a hyper-linked perspective from which the agendas of technology-in-the-service-of-capital are called into question. Though the recent production at BAM of their new work, Super Vision (conceived with the digital design group dbox) is the primary subject of this commentary, it is worth noting that there is already an immaterial archeology of their work, an accrual of digital creation, a trace unusual in the ephemeral world of theatre, that layers on to this newest production. To experience the totality of the work of the Builders is to sit in front of the screen traveling toward what one hopes is a "not this, but that" intervention in global cyberspace. I refer here, in particular, to a Builders Association Website created as one of the three parts of a work collectively known as Alladeen, which was created in association with the British company motiroti. Alladeen also included a stage performance, produced at BAM 2004, and, as a whole, investigated the outsourcing of telephone operator jobs to India [see PAJ 77, 2004—eds.]. One hopes, one is even invited to expect, that the experience of this travel into and through the Alladeen Website will be one of estrangement, a defamiliarization, a collision, a discomfort great enough to make me move: aside, ahead, behind, over, below, anywhere, but not here, where I am. Here, I am obeying, like routine, like it's the given world, the new dynamics of virtual circulation: of capital, and of me. But computer-driven technology, even in the hands of director Marianne Weems, who is intent on raising provoking, critical questions about it, seems to resist tampering with its structures and its effects.

Super Vision is an elegant, compelling, and often funny 75 minutes in the theatre. As we wait for the show to begin, there are six or seven people (are they actors?) sitting, chatting, at a long table on the floor of the theatre. Above them, the proscenium opening, the stage/screen. Each has his or her own computer, linked to a monitor and live feed Webcam. The space is sparse, clean, the bare bones of what is to come, what is to be made by the innocuous bodies before us, those computers. A disarmingly entertaining monologue then opens the play. A woman stands in front of the audience and identifies, according to our zip codes, where we are likely to be sitting in the theatre, what is known about us and how we live. (That is, those of us who bought our tickets with credit cards.) Thus we are routed, through the specter of our own data bodies, shaped by corporate data mining, into Super Vision where, according to what Weems—in interviews—has termed "data space," becomes visible. This is the space where data bodies, those selves that are collections of a multitude of electronic information, circulate.

The stage/screen then sweeps into motion, becoming a virtual world. The proscenium is a hybrid of a cinemascope film and a TV screen. Beyond this portal is an acting space for live bodies behind and in front of which screens receive the projections that create three dimensional but immaterial worlds, dataspheres, through which the live bodies of actors slide. The table below remains fully visible, as actors and technicians watch the show, or fragments of it, on their computers.

There are three narratives in the text, written by Constance De Jong. Although each narrative is performed in a series of fragments, the actors use a surprisingly realistic performance style to show us very materially experienced...