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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.
Could you describe your role in the process of developing SUPER VISION?
Moe Angelos: I came into the process at the rehearsal phase and final creation of the production, but the piece had been in workshop for maybe a year and a half prior to that. I wasn’t part of that.
When would that have been?
Moe Angelos: I was in a reading last November (2004). I might be wrong about that. Anyway, we began this process in August (2005). So that is when I really became engaged. The storyline of the Grandmother and Granddaughter was established before I got there, but some of our text came out of improvisation during the process.
Was that before Constance DeJong was involved?
Moe Angelos: No. Constance was there prior to me, actually.
What was your involvement in the development of SUPER VISION?
David Pence: I came into SUPER VISION part way through the process this past summer (2005), when I came to New York to be part of the two script development workshops. Actually I suppose my involvement started the summer before—in 2004. I was in South Bend, Indiana, working with Marianne Weems, Moe Angelos, and Jessica Chalmers on a Builders’ piece called AVANTI (2003-5). During rehearsal one day, Marianne said, ‘I have this piece of text. Would you be willing to read it? We’re going to use it as a trailer for SUPER VISION, the next piece.’ So I read two pages of text as a monologue, and Dan Dobson recorded it. LINK. It’s an interesting recording to listen to now, especially to see some of the ways the piece changed. In that original monologue a man tells about how he died in a car crash and how his wife found his laptop, which was full of secrets. Some of those elements of the Fletcher narrative remain in the piece to the present day. Anyway, that was the beginning of my involvement with the project.