precenting the line (2019)
“A hero needs a stage or a pedestal or a pinnacle. You put him in a bag and he looks like a rabbit or a potato” – Ursula Le Guin.
Precenting The Line (2019) is a multimedia performance lecture which traces the charismatic narrative and spectacle surrounding individual technologies, and what stories give power to systems.
The Romans knew what was good; they knew their infrastructure. They made concrete by mixing lime and volcanic mortar. Their poets got excited about things like villas, baths and aqueducts, and wrote poetry on ‘the praises of a good modern road’. Millenia later, these enthusiasms continue. Bridges, rockets, computers, even radios get the glamour treatment; as poets wrote their odes to roads, so new technologies get the special treatment through trade shows, marketing and – for software – stories of exception, magic, heroism and wonder. But in an age where software seeps its way into everything, everything can be enthralling; we need different stories which take the shine off.
Combining live performance and video, Precenting The Line interrogates how charisma and spectacle manifest through the individual and what lies beyond the frame.
Precenting The Line was commissioned by Institute of Experimental Design and Media Cultures of the Academy of Art and Design FHNW and performed at FHNW / HeK Basel as part of the Re-Imagining AI symposium and Entangled Realities: Life With Artificial Intelligence exhibition.
