PLASMA subjects its audience to an identification process

Wittingly or unwittingly, we keep leaving tracks of data and are permanently being identified by electronic systems whose technical equipment is becoming increasingly smarter. Facial recognition software, fingerprinting, iris and body scanners record distinguishing features and data in order to verify for the control system that we really are who we are and what we appear to be.

In ID the audience is subjected to an identification process: data is collected, booking numbers are compared, forms stamped and passes issued. The machinery of a bureaucratic ghost train ride past friendly hostesses and busy receptionists is set in motion. The audience members, however, cannot meet the system’s demands as they never present the right form or appropriate identification number and the crucial lists do not contain their names.

We are experiencing a dream-like walk through an automated facility; it’s as if we had left the world and were ushered through the registration system of the gates of heaven. And as the system registers and files us, it evokes the question: “Why do I think that I am me and not someone else, and if I lost my ID card and forgot my access code, address, name and biography, would I still be me or would I already - or again - be someone else?

With this new PLASMA Project 13, Lukas Bangerter attempts a formal superposition of installation/environment and proscenium theater. Using a new type of video technology that interacts with the players and receives and processes impulses from the audience in real-time, PLASMA accedes to a new plane of its work, all the while remaining consistent in its choice of topics: in place of the tragicomical characters of previous projects with their recurring and hopeless struggle for identity on various levels, there are now stewards and hostesses guiding the audience through a hyperaesthetic world located between the social poles of politically necessary data transparency and the inherent secrecy required for the preservation of national security.

Does the identification apparatus actually still have a clear view of what it is supposed to identify? Or do structural errors create new identities? Or is this part of the system’s unintentional collateral effect that produces new identities through dissociation and differentiation? “Is there an underlying dramaturgical process?” one asks oneself and begins suspecting that God might be a dramaturg.

ID is a walk-around theater project. A three-dimensional concert. A scenic sculpture.

ID is a coproduction with the Theaterhaus Gessnerallee in Zurich and is produced with a group program subsidy of the Theaterkommission der Stadt Zürich (theater commission of the city of Zurich) awarded to PLASMA.

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This project is made possible by:

  • Dr. Adolf Streuli-Stiftung,
  • Ernst Göhner Stiftung,
  • Institut for performing art and film / ZHdK,
  • Institut für Bildverarbeitung (BIWI), Dept. Informationstechnologie und Elektrotechnik ETH Zuerich,
  • Kanton Zürich Fachstelle Kultur,
  • Präsidialdepartement der Stadt Zürich Theaterförderung,
  • Pro Helvetia,
  • TBS – touchless – biometric - systems Holding AG

Weiterführende Information

Pressematerial