The 2017 Live Arts Bard Biennial, We’re Watching, is a performance exhibition about surveillance. The exponential growth of the surveillance state—and its effect on human rights and on our political, social, and private lives—has become one of the defining subjects of the twenty-first century. Surveillance technology and its controversial uses is ever present in the news and may have irreversibly altered our lives—from state- sponsored hacking, WikiLeaks, corporate espionage, police body cameras, and drone warfare to the purportedly benign technologies of street mapping, social media, and the so-called Internet of Things.

We’re Watching brings together seven reflections on surveillance by contemporary American artists through the analog (and perhaps archaic) technologies of live performance. All of these projects are new, some are works-in-progress, and most were commissioned by Live Arts Bard. The relationship between subject and form might seem paradoxical: surveillance is anonymous, mechanized, and impersonal, the data it collects can be archived indefinitely, disseminated, and searched. Performance, by contrast, is intrinsically ephemeral and dependent on human interaction. Its liveness cannot be wholly recorded, transmitted, or reproduced. Yet performance and surveillance, in the broadest sense, have a long and intricate relationship. Theater, dance, and other live arts are built on a relationship between spectator and performer; the very word “theater” is derived from the Greek for “the watching place.” In its expansion and reach, the contemporary surveillance state has developed nearly infinite platforms for performance and voyeurism, from Twitter feeds to the wearable cameras that will, by some estimates, be owned by 80% of the world’s population in 2020.

This uneasy symbiosis between surveillance and performance, machine and human, is a recurring theme in many of the projects of We’re Watching. Although the exhibition’s subject is politically charged, these biennial artists have approached it obliquely, choosing metaphor and fantasy over direct representation. They have conceived seven non-literal spaces to encourage reflection, imagination, investigation, and resistance, from the vertiginous, inverted pastoral of Retina to the realm of the “already dead” of What Remains, the disorienting planetarium of The Great Outdoors, the dystopias of Opacity and Future St., and the laboratories of The Rehearsal Artist and Foundation for Healing. Collectively they challenge us to consider incursions of surveillance into our lives, and also to consider what in us might remain private, hidden from view— unsurveillable.

We’re Watching is the culmination of the second edition of the Live Arts Bard Biennial, a two-year program comprising artist residencies and commissions, academic conferences, and related undergraduate courses at Bard College. On behalf of all our colleagues we are thrilled that you have joined us. We hope to welcome you back often to the Richard B. Fisher Center for the Performing Arts.

— Gideon Lester, Artistic Director of Theater and Dance and Caleb Hammons, Senior Producer