TROPOLISM

Last week I experienced Super Vision at the Brooklyn Academy of Music. The show was thrilling in its technology, with super-highres-and-bright projectors in front, back, and a few actors roaming around amongst the sets. The most interesting thing to me, and architect, was not the show (our data tells a story, it's a bad one, etc etc), because the complete lack of dramatic tension made it a bit hollow. Case in point: you, reading this blog, surely know your IP address is being recorded, whether you or I like it or not. But that hasn't prevented you from surfing your blog circuit this morning. Super Vision excelled because of its staging. The computers and half of the actors were outside the proscenium. The proscenium had been turned into a huge television-shaped screen, with some depth behind it for the actors and multiple, overlapping projections. And, the sets were much like a Jeremy Blake painting, sliding, creating their own, internal dramatic tension. In fact, the people seemed superfluous. They could have said nothing, and the minutae of the projections would have kept me quiet for its 70-minute duration.