Artist: The Builders Association
Condensed Biography: a performance and media company that creates original productions based on stories drawn from contemporary life. The company uses the richness of new and old tools to extend the boundaries of theater. Based on innovative collaborations, Builders’ productions blend stage performance, text, video, sound, and architecture to tell stories about human experience in the 21st century. The Builders Association is currently one of the most active international touring experimental theater companies in America.
Location: New York, US
Artwork#1: SUPER VISION
Genre: theatre performance
Description: SUPER VISION explores the changing nature of our relationship to living in a post-private society, where personal electronic information is constantly collected and distributed. The data files collected on us circulate like extra bodies, and these “data bodies” carry stains that are harder to clean than mud or sin; from birth certificates to bad credit, every moment of activity contributes to the construction of one’s own data body.
SUPER VISION is dedicated to the memory of Susan Sontag (1933-2004).
Website: www.thebuildersassociation.org/prod_supervision.html
Quote: “One of my most gratifying experiences was when Bonnie [Marranca] coined the word “Mediaturgy” as the title for my interview in her book Performance Histories—my point being that media onstage demands meaning; it is not simply a backdrop.”
Marianne Weems, the artistic director of The Builders Association.
Source: PAJ: A Journal of Performance and Art, Volume 34, Number 1, January 2012 (PAJ 100), MIT Press, p.83
bio (technology, post-humanism) — art • — ira