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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.
Nick Kaye: Do you find that you are rethinking or extending the concept of your character and performance into the media itself? Or do you find that your practice is still separate from it?
David Pence: That is a really interesting question. I hold onto and employ almost all of the same techniques that I learned in acting school about building a character—that is always home base for me. There will be times during the process of working on a Builders’ piece when I start to feel unmoored because of the technology. So much time in rehearsal is spent talking about some aspect of video shooting or transmission, about the difference between this angle and that angle of my face with the camera. Then I need to remember the human material that is underlying the whole performance. I don’t know what the best metaphor for this is, but the one that comes into my mind has to do with temperature. For me, there is perhaps a potential for too much chilliness in the performance, because of all the machinery and mediation. I’m more interested, as an audience member and certainly as a performer, if the chill is reduced somewhat. For me the work that I do on a character—the fundamental work—is where whatever warmth that ends up in the performance is going to come from. So I find very simple ways, hopefully, to go back and refuel—to get the balance right again.
see also: acting | playing to camera | costume |