Instance: The Builder’s Association

This essay explores the position of the human in the space of technology by examining Super Vision, The Builders Association’s ninth major work since the company’s formation in 1994. Created in collaboration with multimedia company dBox, it explores the concept of “data bodies”; the versions of ourselves that exist as the collation of all the data files that collectively store our information. The perceived supremacy of information has altered our social, economic, and creative practices and the concept of the “data-body” explored in Super Vision epitomises the contemporary cultural tendency to perceive information as dominant over the material world. This case study will explore how Super Vision presents the human as positioned within what Katherine Hayles has labelled “a condition of Virtuality” defined as “the cultural perception that material objects are interpenetrated by information patterns” (2000, 69, original emphasis). This essay uses Hayles’ semiotics of Virtuality to provide a point of departure from which to address the complex and dynamic intermingling of presence, absence, pattern and randomness that occurs in intermedial performance. Such an analytical framework foregrounds the intersections of these dialectics and enables theatre analysis to avoid reinforcing the distinction of the live and the mediatised, and focus instead on the patterns and rhythms created across media.