I am very interested in exploring humans’ relationship with technology in the final performance and believe that an interactive performance is the best way to do this. I am specifically interested in touching on issues of surveillance, the reduction of people’s entire lives to data and our increasing reliance on technology in our everyday lives.
- I played around with an example I found in the Generative Design book. This example took a picture and turned pixels within a certain range of colors into a string of characters. I changed the picture to the silhouette of a person, and the string into a series of random letters, characters and numbers. This is supposed to represent our reduction into data and away from being real humans. I also added a text box, which turns the words coming from the person’s mouth into mere strings of random characters.
- One idea that really stood out to me is creating a segment of the performance where the performer is fleeing from surveillance. One way I thought that this could be implemented would be having moving parts of the sketch that would be surveillance (cameras, lights, etc.) and the performer maneuvering around digitally rendered structures in the environment (roofs, boxes, buildings, etc.). When the performer is caught in the light/camera then it will be as if they were caught by the surveillance. This is just one idea I had of how to technically implement this, but I think that using an interactive performance to mimic surveillance and the performer’s struggle to avoid it and/or conform and submit to it would be interesting to create.
