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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.
Were you linking sound or other aspects of the performance to the Motion Capture?
Dan Dobson: Yeah - in Ohio we were and we were going to take - we had no idea what to do with that data. The MoCap information is really just numbers - you can use the computer to make those numbers look like the dot. Yeah we did a crazy amount of motion capture. That was the early on certainly a lot of the ideas that would be using, that data to inform the technology in some interesting way. Like - just using those numbers that are there to drive the application Max (Max/MSP). Max is a programming environment and it really is just a number cruncher, but people use it to make sound - to affect video and sound. So we would have all these numbers floating around. But in the end on a performance level, an audience will never make that association. We didn’t find that as interesting as the representation of data.
So in this conception you were dealing with the numbers that arose out of the motion capture and feeding that back into the soundscape.
Dan Dobson: We never actually did it, but that certainly was a plan at one point.
So traces of that remain?
Dan Dobson: Very little, we actually do use some of that MoCap in the show, a little bit of it.
How did you move forward from there?
Dan Dobson: We went onto the idea of the ‘data body’ - that being that you are born and you are immediately give medical records, all of which is becoming electronic. So from the second you are born you have that electronic personality and then it just grows as you go through life. The big easy story is identity theft - and we hit on the fastest growing form of identity theft in this country being the family – family on family. Children are turning 18 and applying for credit cards and realizing that somebody has run up a huge debt in their name.
see also: rehearsal | data birds | data environment |