Super Vision

The Builders Association
Royal Court (4th-6th May 2006)

Reviewed by John Owen

The realities of living in the high tech age, and the cost in human social relations was exploded into an amazing schizophrenic 3D sensorial style production that hit hard where it hurts the most - the head.

Several interrelated traumatic themes developed from one premise - the age of technology, all-powerful omnipotent technocrats running a bureaucratic state, and how our life is controlled monitored policed surveilled watched and eventually either overpowers or delivers you to freedom nirvana a debt free world but at a price.

The parallel to twitchers is superb observation, bird watching in cyber space flocks of information being tracked migrating from one computer to another screen to an airport official with a decision to prevent and stamp out terrorists.

A Matrix Tron meets the Grand Guinol experience should you take the blue or white nothing to declare exit. With references to war on terror shoe bombs and mental disintegration and breakdown and dispersal loss and retrieval. People suffering from intetermenesia a computer virus version of Alzheimer’s.

The 1984 age of totalitarianism predictions of Orwell are manifested in a bored man engaged in repetitious actions, who has life and death over passengers at airport checkins. To scan their retinas, face, fingerprints and access personal data. They have data and power at their disposal. Long live the international replaced by “drop ‘em open yer legs lets global Uber-tek baby”. This is a body cavity search terrorist scum.

The age of the traveller, the age of global markets, reason gone mad, the lost luggage of people’s lives reassembled digitally in another screen. “Gimme shelter” is looped as our traveller’s thwarted. Johnny junior’s dad lands him with half a million debt, scamming, and his past catching up with his son’s future a brave new world.

As we grow more savvy and sophisticated will another Shakespeare grow, in the short burst information age, Ipod users whose footsteps fall behind the world’s policeman in search for a white collar to feel?

Do we need the floating flocks of pixelated data tailing us like a bad odour; paper trails become hacker crimes writers beware. The break up of the family through constant traverse, synonymous with lost luggage, an acceptance of police state culture where human warmth is replaced by cold hard LCD digital read outs on a neon glowing screen somehow xmas emails don’t bring the same rosy glow as a card written and signed by a loved one.

To find out more visit The Builders Association website