The Builders Association and dbox, SUPER VISION: THE TRAVELLER
SUPER VISION tells three stories1. 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.
Rizwan Mirza, the traveller
Image by dbox
Rizwan Mirza
Nick Kaye: What was your role in the process of SUPER VISION’s evolution?
Rizwan Mirza: Marianne had an idea about a travelling character - and the airports. I had come up with the idea of playing a South Asian or Indian character, but one who had never been really to India. A character that didn’t identify with being Indian, culturally, that was, in fact, Ugandan, being born and raised in Uganda. My role before this, in ALLADEEN, was an Indian from Bangalore, India, so I wanted to stretch it a little bit. The traveller is an individual crossing these international borders and national American borders – who is suspect. Partly because of the colour of his skin, or, in this particular case, his name is similar to a person who had been convicted of something or suspected of something - of some kind of terrorist activity, more than likely. I wanted the character to be sympathetic, but to seem a little bit shady, a little bit dodgy, at times. So the audience would say, well, wait a second; I am looking at these things that seem to be mapping out a particular pattern of strange activity. Then to bring them back to; ‘oh no, no, he’s fine’. I think that is a theme that goes through The Builders Association’s shows - not to take sides. Hopefully it doesn’t - it steps back from it.
Allen Hahn
Allen Hahn: There is, also, a conceptual aspect to this. In the story of the traveller, there was a lot of talk about the traveller becoming less material as his story progressed… that he became less a physical presence, and instead more a presence defined in the body of data that accumulated around him. The interesting thing about that is it seemed kind of a natural progression. We had talked about it but then it just seemed to happen in rehearsal without having to broker very much.
see also: data body | material presence | visual language |
SUPER VISION credits
