The Presence Project: SCREEN

The Builders Association and dbox, SUPER VISION: SCREEN

SUPER VISION tells three stories

1. As he crosses successive borders, a solitary traveler 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.

Allen Hahn

Nick Kaye: I think it is very interesting that this screen that comes down and becomes the environment is also softened in a number of ways – I didn’t see JUMP CUT (FAUST) (1997), but looking at the imagery from it, it seems like a very hard edged set of separations – whereas here the softening of the edge and the curve of the video itself seems to be an important part of the integration of the performers into environment.

Allen Hahn: I think ALLADEEN (2002-5) can be seen as a transitional step between those two pieces. There are two major projects between JUMP CUT (FAUST) (1997) and ALLADEEN which I can’t really speak to, because I didn’t work on them. Certainly in ALLADEEN there were some scenes where the actor played in relation to a realistic animated background, which has become the bulk of what we see in SUPER VISION. Also, I think in the third section of ALLADEEN, the video imagery on the screen above the stage suddenly becomes the element that lies back a little, and the action – the visual action - becomes the action happening on the stage with the bright colours that heretofore we have only seen in projection – an interaction of a different type between the actors and the physical space.