The Builders Association and dbox, SUPER VISION: FAMILY SCENES
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.
David Pence: Kyle deCamp and I—in working on the Fletchers’ relationship, and with the projection of the boy—talked a lot in the beginning about how there were few opportunities for her and me to touch each other. There is an incidental moment in the first scene when we’re standing stage left and the boy, John Fletcher Jr., comes up in the kitchen window and interrupts us and says he’s bored, and she turns around to speak to him. Then I cross behind her to speak to him, and I just touch her shoulder. We talked quite a bit about the importance of a moment like that, because we didn’t want John and Carol—however fucked up their marriage may be—we didn’t want them to be cold and sexless. That would be too easy, and not as interesting for us as performers. We wanted to make a suggestion to the audience—if anybody chose to notice and think about such a small nuance—that what’s missing in the family is something else.
Another provocative discovery for me was the idea that the son, John Fletcher Jr., is unreachable. He is embedded in the dbox imagery behind me, so I can reach out through space, but I can’t get to him. So there is a kind of longing that is almost sensual, because I am poised between things that I cannot touch in this weird, confusing space of my own creation. Finally, after I realise that I have to leave and get to some empty place where I can be at peace, again I find myself alone in a kind of physical limbo. And again I have an impulse to reach out and guide that boy—but still I can’t get to him.
I find the content of these two relationships very provocative. I think being a father myself helped me find the vein of this character and home in on a couple of core issues or impulses in him, namely protection and privacy. I believe John Fletcher Sr. acts out of a profound desire to protect his son. And part of that protection—ironically enough, given what he’s doing to the boy’s virtual identity—is keeping John Jr. away from his father.
SUPER VISION credits
