Super Vision is a multimedia theater performance with three distinct story lines. In one of those story lines, an international traveler is repeatedly confronted by a customs agent over the course of his years of travel – we see multiple vignettes of these encounters. The first we see is standard stuff – the agent asks, “who are you, where are you going, what are you doing there?” As the story continues, however, the customs agent has more and more information and therefore asks more and more questions. But over the course of this process of gathering and interpreting and modifying the information, more and more of the details become incorrect, then disconnected from original reality, and finally, the data is the sum of what the traveler is allowed to be, despite its lack of connection to the real person. The character at the end is defeated as his original self.
Super Vision is not merely about the well-worked idea that we’re over-survielled – that’s just its point of departure. The central notion is of a formation and identification of a “data body” – the “person” created through all this collected data. Perhaps this is our "data identity" and in this case it is obvious that the data identity is eventually only an approximation of what the character thinks of as his actual self, until he finally has to give in to the identity created for him by the state to be able to continue to do what he wants to do. Some outside force (whatever that can mean) has constructed his identity.
I think the interesting intersecting elements of this data identity are: the highly specific and extensive detail in some data (all the data you provide when you make an online purchase, for example), the completely obtuse data in other cases (the layers of meaning of and relationships between the data elements), and the things that are missing entirely from data stores (the personal perspective of the original person on which the data body is based on).
There is a fragmentation of our data bodies/data identities, partly because of the way they are situated in multiple ways, partly in the failures of transmission and partly in the arbitrary forms of recording, storing, and recalling. In Super Vision, we see this fragmentation weaving a tighter and tighter net around the character.
Unfortunately, some people are more personally susceptible to being overcome by the external creation of this data identity. It could be said that some people are more likely to become targets or victims of this kind of technological entanglement – someone who must interact with the data gatherers and interpreters, and by extension, the gatekeepers of government and industry, for instance.
Conversely, I think that the fragmentation (and confounding intersections) of the data it could end up protecting us by helping us resist data consolidation and centralization that forms each of our own data identity/data body.
Here’s an interesting excerpt from an article about Super Vision:
DATA BODIES AND THE AWESOME
APPARATUS OF TECHNOLOGY
Maurya Wickstrom
The production seems deliberately to
stage all the possible varieties of the
ways that the human body can be seen
to be appearing and disappearing in a
relationship with a hyperlinked global
datasphere. There are, in Super Vision,
so many levels of presence, absence,
visibility and invisibility, or, rather,
dissolution, dissolving, teasing appearances.
These add up to questions about
the ontology of what we are, now, as
fully participating members of the data
world. The title of the piece suggests to
us that we need a new way of seeing to
glimpse these networks of disappearance
and reappearance, and what is
animating or driving them.
(http://muse.jhu.edu/cgi-bin/access.cgi?uri=/journals/performing_arts_journal/v028/28.2wickstrom.html)
A review in the LA Times describes the production better than most reviews I seen:
http://www.calendarlive.com/music/cl-et-super8dec08,0,4392940.story?coll=cl-nav-music
Here are the production’s own sites:
http://presence.stanford.edu:3455/Collaboratory/339
http://www.superv.org/