The Netizens of the world are in the midst of an identity crisis — there is more information publicly available about each of us, and I have a sneaking suspicion that we have less to fear from the government’s Echelon agencies snooping on our reading lists than we do from Amazon.com’s patented shopper profiling technology. Heck, even the government is turning to the online giants to get its info. AOL recently ignited a firestorm by making public a detailed record of their users’ online searches. They didn’t have names attached to the searches, but the New York Times found it almost laughably easy to identify user No. 4417749 simply by analyzing what subjects she searched on.
This mounting identity crisis is precisely the subject of Super Vision, an elegantly, beautiful and disquieting multimedia production by The Builder’s Association and studio dbox, which I caught at the Yerba Buena Center forthe Arts. Mixing cutting-edge computer technology with real-time action, it’s a show that makes a powerful impact, visually and viscerally.
The action of this unusual and absorbing show plays out in a multi-layered space, with a line of screens and equipment set up like mission control in front of an ambiguous wide-screen space in which live actors interact with each other and with projections of objects in computer-manipulated surroundings.
The main plotline centers on three disparate and yet thematically linked dots in a constellation of datasphere characters, starting with a perfect family who appear to be idyllically situated in front of an Auto-CAD generated Dream House (shades of the ubiquitous TV walls in Ray Bradbury’s Fahrenheit 451). The father logs onto his computer to enter a kind of Holodeck space — dominated by an IMAX-sized vision of his own face on awebcam — in which he creates money transfer schemes using his young son’s identity.
In another segment, a business traveler with an Indian name and a Ugandan passport endures grilling at the hands of suspicious passport control officials, who call up and manipulate his data in a creepily brisk manner reminiscent of Tom Cruise in the prescient Minority Report. The third segment deals with a young New Yorker who stays in touch via webphone with her aging grandmother who lives in Sri Lanka. Grandma isn’t on The Grid, but her granddaughter, keen to archive the family’s memories, is mining her for data, even as the older woman’s mind is failing.