TRAILER
NERVOUS SYSTEM 2020
Nervous System 2020 is an installation-performance comprised of dance, spatial sound and holographic imagery. It is created and directed by visual artist Marcel Weber / MFO (DE), choreographed by Guillaume Marie (FR) and features music written by J.G. Biberkopf (LT). The piece plunges into the throes of the information age. An immaterial omnipresence, net and server based, enchants the modern world, daily life became unthinkable without constant technological company.
The piece invites the spectators to meander the currents of this new world. In a space without clear orientation marks they’ll find a Youtuber, who teaches emotional studies to an audience of bots/algorithm/AI, an Otaku, blinded and obsessed by the beautiful dazzle of technological relics, and a runner who seeks the best version of herself in telemetric spirituality. Each of these characters reside in one of three transparent chambers, which are spread out in the wider audience space, de-centralized and separated from each other. Filled with haze, projections form luminous shapes within the chambers, surrounding the performers, who thus becomes inter-actors inside holographic displays. The music, despite its apparent autonomy, connects chambers and space, performers and audience. It takes notions from many places, mutates and blends them, constantly changing it’s shape, appearance and affect, while it’s ingredients align and build one experience.
Elements of Gaming Culture, Dekotora and K-pop, of Photoshopping, Fashion and Trigonometry are hidden in the piece like Easter eggs, while notions of Narcissism and Neurosis, of Over-Stimulation and Ecstasies, of Ritual and Submission are present all along. The performers show gestures and postures of contemporary lifestyle in abstract interpretation, isolated, energetic, highly specialized: nervous cells of an invisible, all-encompassing network.
With our physical and virtual realities increasingly intertwined, Nervous System 2020 is a reflection about this complex relationship and the transformative processes to modern data-driven society.