The Builders Association and dbox, SUPER VISION: ELECTRONIC NETWORK


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 2



Uploaded Image
Onstage: Joe Silovsky, the TSA agent (mediated, left); Rizwan Mirza,
the traveller (right). Forestage: Joe Silovsky, far right.
photo by dbox


Marianne Weems

Nick Kaye: I wanted to ask you specifically about the importance of musical structure to the performance. As a metaphor for the way the piece is put together, references to the cinematic don’t seem sufficient – although SUPER VISION clearly has cinematic elements, the piece as a whole seems to work firstly musically, and explicitly so when you see more than once.

Marianne Weems: Let me say something about the cinema and what I am so attached to as a theatrical idea. In every performance, in all of our shows, for me it is about the performers being really isolated physically, but we are mediating them electronically and so what the audience sees is the network that is joining them all. None of the performers ever really look at each other – Joe Silovsky and Rizwan Mirza are a perfect example of that in this show. What is being staged is the network. They are in very isolated worlds, coming together in that bigger stage picture - that is really key.


see also: immersiveness | musicality | performer presence | playing to camera | rhythmic structure |



SUPER VISION credits