Liminal > Objects for the Emancipated Consumer
Performed at the Seattle Fringe Festival, at the Dekum Building in Portland, and at the LIVE Biennial of Performance Art in Vancouver, BC - January-August, 2001
Objects for the Emancipated Consumer was a performance made of textual and narrative fragments told by six actors as their characters searched for ways to get out of the situations they were in, and pursued clues about the ambiguous possibility of a terrorist crime.
We staged the performance in three different public spaces in three cities. For each iteration, we transformed the space into a fictitious international airport terminal where the actors performed multiple scenes simultaneously as audience members wandered through the space to watch the play unfold.
What made this configuration of audience immersion particularly interesting was that we gave visitors the ability to change the experience through an interactive media system that allowed them to alter the course of the action. To do this, we built a “duty-free” shop in the airport terminal where audiences could “purchase” bar-coded objects that, when scanned by the performance’s central computer system, would alter lighting and sound conditions and activate media that actors were obligated to respond to.
While it’s not unusual to break down the division between performers and audiences, Objects for the Emancipated Consumer heightened the affective potential of the interaction by giving participants access to technology that revealed hidden "actors" in their environment.
