SURVEILLANCE (2013)
The truth of the surveillance cam, however, that like hotel porn, you almost never see anything. A never ending, worldwide, 24x7 tease.
This project will begin development in the fall of 2013.
The fabric of our social reality is very regimented and catalogued. This is no longer anything new. Cultural theorists, activists and, of course artists have responded with a body of work that addresses our fascination and discontent with this course. Nothing new is just about right! We have a rather illustrious ancestry for incursions into the privacy of the individual by a surveillance society dating back to the 17th-century Puritans and their "City upon a Hill" and including Bentham's panopticon, Galton's physiognomic photo composites, and any number of national databases from the DMV to the IRS. Our most glorified panoptic device, the one we are all scared of, yet accustomed to by now is the CCTV camera. The truth of the surveillance cam, however, that like hotel porn, you almost never see anything. A never ending, worldwide, 24x7 tease. And yet we are still aroused and fearful of it.
An enormous body of artistic work spread across all mediums has touched upon this discourse. In a decade which has seen our response to surveillance move from Orwellian dread, through the giddy pornography of Big Brother reality shows, to the googlization of everything, art has had to move quickly to respond in a perceptive, provocative way to raise awareness of our increasingly surveyed world.
So why does ZviDance feel the urgency to add to the discourse? Why now, and specifically, what new perspective can a dance work bring to these issues? Our bodies behave, react and interact very differently when knowing that they are observed. The watched body changes it's posture, gesture set and relationship to space. It begins indulging in it's own exhibitionism, heightened further by the knowledge of being recorded, allowing the body to play itself back, to scrutinize itself, to judge itself. A new kind of stardom and extreme theatricality is heightened by a body becoming a performer in someone else’s script. These nuances and thematic sub-topics are proposed by ZviDance to approach as a movement exploration of the surveyed body. The project will embrace the technological tools necessary to flush out these themes, yet not exhibiting the tech suaveness for the sake of showcasing them as stage elements.
Video recording devices, data mining, psycho-advertising are here to stay. Our society has consented this fact. It is the intention of this work to confront the audience with the now familiar devices and their uses, exploring the root of this acceptance.
In "Surveillance," multiple video camera streams will enact the role of performers, re-sampling these streams live on various screens. Both performers and audience members will take turns using cams, adding their personal viewpoint, implicating themselves in the narrative, taking responsibility, publicly. Several robotic cameras placed in different locations throughout the theater will create an environmental installation, following the audience, creeping behind, visibly and proudly. Cameras will be placed in locations such as the box office, dressing rooms, lobby and back stage, scanning as much of the venue as possible for the duration of the performance. This footage will be sampled and spliced back on stage. An array of monitors will be placed in unexpected locations throughout the theater - including elevators, bathrooms and hallways - providing a closed circuit network of information sharing, reflecting on the growing reality of being under constant surveillance in public spaces. The audience will feel the presence of these devices from the moment they enter the venue, and so will inevitably make a complacent choice to participate simply by sitting in their seat. This comfiness is the beginning of the performance as well as its core question.
The movement vocabulary will explore behavioral responses to a body being watched. How does it react? How does it hide, or willingly exhibits itself? What does this surveyed body move like, how does it protest? How does the real and political body react when confronted and observing it's own doppelganger?
The sound design will further the overall feeling of the panoptic eye, using real-time recordings of audiences footsteps, conversations between audience members, the sound of performers breath - adding an aural architecture of dominance.
