Site Home > The Presence Project > PROLOGUE
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: You created the prologue in collaboration with Marianne Weems. When was that developed?
Tanya Selvaratnam: When we were at the Wexner doing the very first workshop (July 2004) we looked into different sources of information - and so for example, we had a private investigator who came in. We looked at stories about identity theft and there was this web site – I can’t remember if it was James Gibbs or Marianne Weems who heard about it, but it was basically a marketing research web site – Claritas ™ – which I talk about in the prologue. So we did a lot of improvs that summer and one of the improvs for the workshop presentation was set up more like a game show. It was me calling people onto the stage – four audience members sat in chairs and I would do instantaneous searches on them to see how much information we could find by punching their zip code into Claritas ™. So that is where the prologue came from. I don’t know how you feel about the prologue, but the feedback is that the prologue actually scares people, which is good.
Nick Kaye:I think the prologue’s direct address to the audience is very important – partly because it acknowledges the reality of the theatrical mechanism. It also foregrounds the transformation of a particular kind of direct, explicitly theatrical storytelling structure, into a mediatized performance. It also highlights this contrast between your live and mediated performances. To me, throughout the performance, there’s an emphasis on your presence to the audience, and the prologue makes this explicit because you speak to us directly, before your performance is filtered through the technology. Then as the performance unfolds, we always see your mediation in the context of your live performance.
Tanya Selvaratnam: That’s a good way for me to think about it.
see also: