Our Performance was done with the intent of questioning social media in our society, the reason why myself and our group felt this was important was because there is a lot of reference to social media in our daily lives, to the point corporations like the BBC use social media to get people's opinion on things that occur on their television programming.
Within our performance we incorporated several ideas into our performance, chief among them was a company known as Gob Squad, we took some influences from them in terms of our technology use, here I have posted a video to the show by Gob Squad we took influence from, it was called Super-Night-Shot
We used the idea of separating our cameras to focus on a certain person or action, this splitting four cameras on a screen and projecting them upon said screen.
We also took the idea of performing in a traverse set-up because we set up two screens at opposite ends of the studio and a central performance in order to give people the choice of what action they watched, they could watch us on the stage delivering monologues which went in conjunction with the recorded/live versions of us on the cameras, and on the other screen was a Facebook set-up which had use sending messages to the person delivering monologues on stage, so we feel we gave the audience a variety of performance viewing options.
Personally, I think when you actually watch the performance it might be confusing or there might be too much going on which would negate the point of our performance because it means people aren't look at the aspects of the performance we want them to look at.
I think a way to help resolve this issue is to do a performance set up where both screens are on the same side of the space or even next to each other and project them that way, because then while they have to look at a performance set up that's one sided, they can also see all of the things that the group is doing and be able to enjoy the performance more than the set up we are currently employing.
Walter Benjamin (2008) said
“The
artistic
performance of the stage actor … is presented to the audience by the actor in
person. …
The
artistic
performance of the screen actor, on the other hand, is presented to the
audience via a piece of equipment, the film camera
(which) is
not obliged to respect that performance as an
entity.”
So while myself and my group are on the screens being projected, the audience doesn't have to acknowledge that our screen entities have any presence at all and while that might be true for the most part, when we speak through the camera and tell a story or interact with the audience, then the audience themselves have to make the collective decision whether or not they want to accept our presence though a medium other than face to face conversation or performance and we wanted the audience to think about how they might be perceived online and socially in the real world.
With that in mind we feel our piece of performance isn't just a question of social media and it's impacts upon us but rather a question of whether people need to be social through technology or have we become so reliant on technology have we forgot how to be social and how to communicate as people.
References
References
Benjamin,
Walter (2008) [1934] The Work Of Art In The Age Of
Mechanical Reproduction. London, Penguin Books.
