The Presence Project: VIRTUAL ARCHITECTURE

The Builders Association and dbox, SUPER VISION: VIRTUAL ARCHITECTURE

SUPER VISION tells three stories

1. As he crosses successive borders, a solitary traveller gradually is forced to reveal all of his personal information, until his identity becomes transparent, with no part of his life left outside the boundaries of datasurveillance.

2. A young woman (Jen), addicted to the white noise of constant connection, maintains a long-distance relationship with her Grandmother. As she makes efforts to digitally archive her Grandmother's past, the Grandmother slips into senility.

3. A father covertly exploits his young son's personal data to meet the demands of the family's lifestyle. This ploy escalates beyond the father's control, until he is compelled to disappear. His wife and son are left with a starkly diminished data portrait, and his escape is shadowed by the long reach of the datasphere.

James Gibbs

Nick Kaye: In taking a virtual architectural design and installing it into real space, you seem to free up many of these narrative possibilities -

James Gibbs: To me it reads that way, but it reads the converse as well. You are making a drawing - albeit using electronic tools - and instead of having a scale to insert into the drawing you are blowing it up and surrounding a real person. So you are inserting a real person into the drawing space.

Nick Kaye: Which would more accurately describe how the performance is perceived -

James Gibbs: You want these two faces. Certainly, in the end, it is all of these. We are struggling right now with documenting the project. We have one DVD to show to potential presenters that haven’t made it to the show. It is impossible to capture the fidelity of the imagery when you collapse it down to a single DVD – what is up there on stage is actually beyond HDTV resolution. On the other hand, if you just take any one of the virtual elements on their own, outside of the performance, they mean almost nothing. The performance is in all those elements at play, together, live.

SUPER VISION credits