The Builders Association and dbox, SUPER VISION: DATA BODY


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.


Video streaming: Traveller Scene 4


Uploaded Image

Rizwan Mirza, the traveller
Image by dbox

Rizwan Mirza

Nick Kaye: There is a tremendously strong visual play around the traveller, through front and rear projection, as his data accumulates.

Rizwan Mirza: It’s about him being revealed and becoming more a part of the system. At the end he is enveloped with data. He has revealed everything. He is happy to part of the system, to buy into the consumer American dream. He has his platinum flying card. They know he took a defensive driving course. He has got credit lines that have been extended everywhere. He is really part of the system and he is quite happy about it. So it makes you definitely notice that there is a disconnect somewhere.

Nick Kaye: One of the effects of this is to raise questions about how the traveller is constituted as an individual between these different layers of data. In these various projections, which at one point incorporate a multiplication of your performance through projection, there is a spectacular visual play over where you are – between your real body, your projected body and the data body.


Moe Angelos

Nick Kaye: In this blending of real figures and video figures, the relationship between the light of the projected video and the theatrical lighting seems very important. At times, the video figures and the performers share a similar quality of illumination - sometimes David Pence has that when he is lit. It seems to alter the sense of the materiality of the projected and real people.

Uploaded Image
Left to right: Joe Silovsky (the TSA agent) in live mediation; Rizwan Mirza
(the traveller) onstage and, above, in projection; Joe Silovsky on forestage.
Video stills.

Moe Angelos: Also when Rizwan Mirza, the traveller, has the full body scan, there is a live, life-size video image of him standing next to him. You see the real Rizwan lit in profile, while you see a frontal shot of him in video - and it is eerie. Sometimes in rehearsal I will crawl out into the house and watch that part, because it is very compelling. It is him, and the lighting is the same, but it’s - where is the real Rizwan? I also love the end, when he is slowly walking across the stage and the data is falling out behind him, following him. It is a wonderful representation of being followed by these data clouds. It’s a great visual representation of that. These things do trail us.


see also: beginning the process | costume | material presence |


SUPER VISION credits