The Builders Association and dbox, SUPER VISION: THE VIRTUAL BOY


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: Family Scene 2


Uploaded Image
Onstage, left to right: Kyle deCamp (Carol); Owen Philip (John Fletcher Jr.)
in projection.
Video still.

Kyle deCamp: In this piece with The Builders I find myself making choices located in how not to reproduce what’s already going on via other mediums, that hopefully add to the dynamic dissonances onstage. There’s a lot of illusion and affect that I don’t have to create in my performance: in Dan Dobson’s soundscore, in the projected imagery of the house and it’s movement, in the narrative information and flow – they’re all facets of how the story is told. I have to do a different kind of work as a performer in relation to the video-child, because he's a flat projection, and the same every night. What a remarkably consistent little performer he is! So ... somewhat ironically for me, it’s the warmth of my performance that effectively animates him, although he appears to be an “animation” onscreen. This feels quite normal for me. I've been working with live and pre-recorded video and film imagery - both as tools as and source material - as a central part of my theatrical vocabulary for a good 20 years now.

Uploaded Image
Onstage, left to right: David Pence (John Fletcher Sr.), Kyle deCamp (Carol),
Owen Philip (John Fletcher Jr.) in projection.
Video still.

Kyle deCamp: I animate our interactions through my moment-to-moment responses, and play it differently every night. I quickly discovered where I could inflect emotion, rhythmic pauses, overlaps, and play around with the movements between his projection, the moving projection screen, and myself. It sometimes feels like this very human play between a mother and child - even though he’s a projection - is as real if not more humanly warm and “real” than the relationship between the wife and husband, in a way that I hope resonates metaphorically within the story.


see also: carol | the 'crush' scene | the family | the family room | John Fletcher Sr. |


SUPER VISION credits