The First Major Survey of Performances by Contemporary American Artists Exploring Surveillance and Its Impact on Our Identities

New Works by Big Art Group; Annie Dorsen; Hasan Elahi; Michelle Ellsworth; Homi K. Bhabha, John Lucas, Claudia Rankine, and Will Rawls; Samuel Miller; and Alexandro Segade Will Be Installed Throughout the Frank Gehry-Designed Facility

WE’RE WATCHING Follows Acclaimed Inaugural Live Arts Bard Biennial, The House Is Open (2015), Which Transformed the Fisher Center into a Temporary Art Museum and Explored the Interplay Between Contemporary Art and Performance

View a Short Video about WE’RE WATCHING Here: https://vimeo.com/201690809

ANNANDALE-ON-HUDSON, N.Y.— Live Arts Bard (LAB), the residency and commissioning program of the Richard B. Fisher Center for the Performing Arts at Bard College, is pleased to announce the complete schedule for WE’RE WATCHING, the first major survey of performances by contemporary American artists exploring surveillance and its impact on our identities. Traversing an array of twenty-first century phenomena such as police body cameras, Reddit comments, facial recognition software, Google Street View, and inscrutable digital interfaces, the seven works in WE’RE WATCHING chronicle current (and sometimes speculative) surveillance technologies and their transformative effect on security, privacy, civil liberties, the ways we form relationships and communities, and our sense of ourselves as citizens.

WE’RE WATCHING will take place at the Fisher Center over four days, April 27-30, 2017. Please see below for dates and times for each work. Marathon tickets for Saturday, April 29, and Sunday, April 30—covering all five performances and two installations—are available for $95. Tickets for individual performances Thursday, April 27, through Sunday, April 30, are $25 ($10 for students). All tickets can be purchased at to fishercenter.bard.edu or 845.758.7900. The Richard B. Fisher Center for the Performing Arts is located at 60 Manor Avenue, Annandale-On-Hudson, NY, 12504. A roundtrip coach from New York City will be available on Saturday, April 29.

Organized by Gideon Lester, Artistic Director of Theater and Dance, and Caleb Hammons, Senior Producer, WE’RE WATCHING premieres seven new artworks installed and performed in unexpected ways throughout Frank Gehry’s landmark performing arts center. “We’ve commissioned a number of artists to make projects that explore different aspects of surveillance, from social media, to government surveillance, to police body cameras, to facial recognition software and Google Maps,” says Lester. “Each of them is asking questions about the way that we live our lives while we’re being watched, and the way that surveillance affects the ways that we think of ourselves in this 21st Century age, where every aspect of our lives is affected by surveillance and surveillance technology in ways that we may understand or that may most of the time be completely invisible to us.”
 

The program, developed with support from the Goethe-Institute NYC, also includes Spectatorship in an Age of Mass Surveillance, a symposium for artists and scholars that took place at Bard in September 2016, plus undergraduate courses, public events, and a forthcoming special edition of Yale’s Theater magazine.
 

High resolution images are available for download here:

http://fishercenter.bard.edu/press/photos/?gid=650811#a_media

WE’RE WATCHING features works by artists spanning disciplines—writers, photographers, filmmakers, theater and performance artists, and chorographers—in both traditional and nontraditional spaces in the Fisher Center, including rehearsal studios, wings and storage areas, as well as studios and the theater. WE’RE WATCHING includes:

·      
Big Art Group’s Opacity, which is built around the framework of the “interface,” specifically the threat of increasingly opaque intermediation between the digital and the physical. A lone character lies in their bedroom, swiping the phone in search of contact. As the night deepens, their attempts at intimacy unmask a profound and insurmountable corruption.

·      
Annie Dorsen’s The Great Outdoors, in which, in the darkness of a planetarium, a performer guides us on a journey through inner space, stitching together the thoughts of countless individuals using text culled from internet comments. Dorsen sees comments as the Internet’s id—unrestrained, anonymous, let loose. Is this id a roiling sea of primal drives? Or a thoroughly structured and colonized territory?

·      
Hasan Elahi’s Retina, a Live Arts Bard commission using Google Street View imagery to interrogate and disorientate our relationship with natural and built environments. In this site-specific work, Elahi makes reference to the camera obscura as one of the oldest types of surveillance technology. His installation interrogates the state’s increasing reliance on public-private partnerships for purposes of surveillance.

·      
Michelle Ellsworth’s The Rehearsal Artist, a Live Arts Bard commission. Ellsworth turns a rehearsal studio-turned into laboratory where a small group of audience members peep through a one-way mirror at a performer responding to choreographic instructions, derived from the canon of social science experiments.  As the audience’s perception shifts and extends, this iterative and playful performance amplifies and destabilizes the act of watching.

·      
What Remains, a Live Arts Bard commission from writers Homi K. Bhabha and Claudia Rankine, filmmaker John Lucas and choreographer Will Rawls. What Remains stages encounters for a culture that cannot memorialize without exposing society’s role in the disturbance and murder of its citizens. Through movement, language, and video it invites us across the threshold of this historical void, creating an immersive environment from the idea of an entombed imagination, and responding to violence and disappearance with a resonant, ghostly chorus.

·      
Samuel Miller’s (Bard College ’15) Foundation for Healing, a new form of Virtual Reality therapy that focuses on exorcising trauma and hypervigilence caused by living under mass surveillance. A patient will demonstrate to audiences the intimate methods of mental and spiritual rejuvenation they use to thrive in a hostile digital landscape.

·     
  Alexandro Segade’s Future St., a sci-fi saga set in a dystopian Southern California city, where a homosexual police state enforces strict marriage codes among the monitored populace, and an intersectional resistance, made up of queer mutant dissidents and an ancient feminist underground, plots its overthrow. Future St. is a speculative, multi-media theater epic exploring desire, surveillance and the sinister forces of normalization.
 

WE’RE WATCHING is the second edition of the Fisher Center’s innovative, interdisciplinary Live Arts Bard Biennial. It follows the success of the first edition, The House Is Open (November 2015), which included works by John Kelly, Ralph Lemon, Jennifer Monson, Marc Swanson and Jack Ferver, and Nature Theater of Oklahoma, and was lauded by The New York Times as “an inventive and thoughtfully assembled exhibition.”
 

We’re Watching – Schedule of Performances

Big Art Group

Opacity

Thursday, April 27 at 8:30 pm; Saturday, April 29 at 6 pm; Sunday, April 30 at 4 pm

Big Art Group’s Opacity is built around the framework of the “interface,” specifically the threat of increasingly opaque intermediation between the digital and the physical. A lone character lies in their bedroom, swiping the phone in search of contact. With a friend, they renovate their online persona, receive an invitation from a stranger, and arrange for an evening together. As the night deepens, communications obstruct, destinations evade, and attempts at intimacy unmask a profound and insurmountable corruption. Opacity is a dark reflection on our new strategies of connection, reverberating with dread, oddness, and seduction. The performance uses sculptural, choreographic and computational models to hack, encrypt, spoof, troll, spam and camouflage our digital identities, and return these coded selves to the realms of the real. 

Caden Manson and Jemma Nelson formed Big Art Group in 1999 in New York City as a company for the creation of contemporary performance. Big Art Group uses language and media to push formal boundaries of theatre, film and visual arts, and creates culturally transgressive works and innovative performances using original text, technology and experimental methods of communication. In these pieces, Manson invented the integrated spectacle Real-Time Film, a hybrid of cinema and theater in which actors recombined formal ideas of performance through the use of simultaneous acting on stage and for live video using complex choreography, puppetry and autobiography. The company’s works exist in the contemporary stream of expanded performance, wherein traditional narratives and established performer-audience relationships have been opened up to create possibilities of innovative discovery. The work blends high and low technology, marginal and mainstream culture, and blunt investigation to drive questions about contemporary experience.

Big Art Group has appeared at and been commissioned by international theater festivals (Festival d’Automne à Paris, Wiener Festwochen, Hebbel am Ufer Berlin, Szene Salzburg, deSingel, Kaaitheater, Walker Arts Center, PICA and the Kitchen among many others); received grants from The Jerome Foundation, The Greenwall Foundation, DNA (Andrew W. Mellon foundation and Arts International,) Florence Gould Foundation, MAP Fund, étant donnés; and has written for Theater Journal, PAJ, TDR, Mouvement and Theater Heute as well as being anthologized in critical studies of contemporary theater. Manson and Nelson also created the social network and web site ContemporaryPerformance.com for the exchange, diffusion and innovation of ideas in contemporary performance by global innovators; it has a viewership of 70,000 practitioners in the field. In addition, Manson and Nelson host an annual festival in New York’s Lower East Side in January called Special Effects, to showcase experiments in new practices in the field.

Caden Manson is a 2001 Foundation for Contemporary Art Fellow, is a 2002 Pew Fellow and a 2011 MacDowell Fellow, and currently serves as an Associate Professor and John Wells Graduate Directing Option head at Carnegie Mellon University.

Jemma Nelson, M.S. Biostatistics, is co-founding member of Big Art Group, has written and composed its works, and received a 2009 Fellowship from the Pennsylvania Council on the Arts.

Annie Dorsen

The Great Outdoors

Friday, April 28 at 6 & 8:30 pm; Saturday, April 29 at 1 & 4 pm; Sunday, April 30 at 1:30 and 7:30 pm 

In the darkness of a planetarium, The Great Outdoors takes us on a journey through inner space. Using text culled from internet comments, a solo performer gives voice and body to the thoughts of countless individuals all tapping away at their keyboards in isolation. We tend to think of comments as the worst of human communication: the id unrestrained, protected by anonymity and let loose. Where does this id come from, and how does it function? Is it a roiling sea of primal drives? Or a thoroughly structured and colonized territory? Up in the clouds of cyberspace, we encounter the “out-there” and the “in-here” all together at once. And from their collision: contradiction, perplexity and desire. A new form of celestial authority, the Internet is made of us, and not-us. It’s a governing body, which regulates and directs the flow of our imaginations into new forms of consumption—in which the primary product we consume is ourselves.

Annie Dorsen is a writer and director who works in a variety of fields, including theatre, film, dance and, as of 2009, algorithmic performance. Most recently, her algorithmic music-theater piece Yesterday Tomorrow premiered at the Holland Festival, and has since been seen at MaerzMusik (Berlin), T2G as part of Festival d’Automne (Paris), Le Maillon (Strasbourg), Théâtre Garonne (Toulouse), and others. Her previous algorithm project, A Piece of Work, premiered at On the Boards (Seattle), and was presented at Théâtre Paris-Villette (Paris), Brooklyn Academy of Music's Next Wave Festival (NYC), and others. In 2012 she made Spokaoke, a participatory karaoke project that uses political and historical speeches in place of pop songs. Her first algorithmic theatre piece, Hello Hi There, premiered at Streirischer Herbst (Graz) in 2010, and has been presented at over 20 theaters and festivals in the US and Europe, as well as, in installation form, at Bitforms Gallery in New York. She is the co-creator of the 2008 Broadway musical Passing Strange, which she also directed. Spike Lee made a film of her production of the piece, which premiered at the Sundance Film Festival in 2009, and screened everywhere from the Tribeca Film Festival to South by Southwest Film Festival and The Tribeca Film Festival, and was released theatrically by IFC in 2010 before being broadcast on PBS’ Great Performances. Also in 2010, she collaborated with choreographer Anne Juren on Magical which premiered at ImPulsTanz Festival (Vienna) and with Ms. Juren and DD Dorviller on Pièce Sans Paroles at brut (Vienna) and Rencontres Choréographiques Internationales Seine-St-Denis (Paris). She has collaborated often with musicians, including Questlove of The Roots on Shuffle Culture (BAM), Laura Karpman and Jessye Norman on Ask Your Mama, a setting of Langston Hughes’ 1962 poem (Carnegie Hall) and with the string quartet ETHEL on Truckstop, also at BAM. Her pop-political performance project Democracy in America was presented at PS122 in 2008. Her short film, I Miss, originally the centerpiece of Democracy in America, has screened at American Film Institute Festival (AFI Fest), SXSW Film Festival, The New York Film Festival’s “Views From the Avant-Garde” and the Nantucket Film Festival. She is the recipient of a 2008 OBIE Award, the 2014 Herb Alpert Award in the Arts, and grants from The MAP Fund and New York State Council on the Arts. In 2017, she begins a visiting professorship in the Theatre and Performance Studies Department at University of Chicago.

Hasan Elahi

Retina

Thu. April 27 – Sun. April 30

In his new series, Retina, Hasan Elahi uses Google Street View imagery to interrogate and disorientate our relationship with natural and built environments. In this site-specific commission, Elahi employs surveillance imagery to render the walls of the Fisher Center apparently invisible, giving spectators an uncanny view of the parkland beyond. The images are printed upside down and inverted in the space, as if generated by a camera obscura. Retina makes reference to the camera as a tool of surveillance and also acknowledges that the camera obscura was one of the oldest types of surveillance technology. The use of Google Street View addresses the state’s increasing reliance on public-private partnerships, and the exploitation of “public” data, for purposes of surveillance.

Hasan Elahi is an interdisciplinary artist whose work examines issues of surveillance, citizenship, migration, transport, and borders and frontiers. His work has been presented in numerous exhibitions, at venues such as SITE Santa Fe, Centre Georges Pompidou, Sundance Film Festival, Kassel Kulturbahnhof, The Hermitage and the Venice Biennale. Elahi was recently invited to speak about his work at the Tate Modern, Einstein Forum, the American Association of Artificial Intelligence, the International Association of Privacy Professionals, World Economic Forum and at TED Global. His awards include grants from the Creative Capital Foundation, Art Matters Foundation and a Ford Foundation/Phillip Morris National Fellowship. His work is frequently in the media, and has been covered by The New York Times, Forbes, Wired, CNN, ABC, CBS and NPR, and has appeared on Al Jazeera, Fox News, and on “The Colbert Report.” He is currently Associate Professor of Art at University of Maryland, and from 2011 to 2014 was Director of Design | Cultures + Creativity in the Honors College. In 2010, he was an Alpert/MacDowell Fellow, and, in 2009, was Resident Faculty at Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture.