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Artist Focus 19: Me and the Machine

30 September, 2013


Me and the Machine uses technology cleverly to give you an entirely different worldview.‘ The Guardian

Me and the Machine is a multidisciplinary performance group. Their work combines everyday audiovisual and interactive technology with choreographed screens, live performance and text in adventurous and accessible ways, to question emotions and social relations in the midst of our media-inundated lives. The results range from wearable videos to participative cinema screenings, guerrilla street installations, one-to-one theatre, immersive dance film, ongoing research projects and an online platform for the anonymous exchange of secrets.

Audiences are invited to engage performatively in unique experiences, being dislocated into hybrid realms, somewhere in between reality, poetry and fiction. The high production values and “experimental and risk –taking approach” of these works has been recognized by audiences and colleagues internationally.

The Show of your Life

Historians, novelists and cinema script writers often ponder about the source of those outbursts in history when people revolt and fight for something they feel, think or dream as a more just world. But what about the absence of conflict in those moments when material and affective penury penetrates life, sometimes to the brink of unbearableness? Why do we stand still and remain submissive, ready to accept and implement control and instructions while exploited, oppressed or bored to death?

Perhaps because the enemy is not something as alien as a creepy monster with watery eyes, armed with laser guns? Perhaps not even televised turban-wearing bearded men? In which everyday gestures does the face of the monster reveal?

We invite you for a walk into a very familiar unknown, a house of mystery ready to manage your future all the way to the end of your time. A ground-breaking, horizon-size, hyper-efficient spectacle-machine is under construction here for us, by us, inside us, all over us. We don’t know the end, we don’t know the purpose but we have a system in place and we’re all very nice people, so it can’t go that bad…

It’s easy: put the video-goggles on like a normal pair of glasses, then the headphones and just relax and follow until the show is over – follow the film, follow the rhythm, follow the yellow brick road.

After all, it is all just a film and exit doors are always open… Or are they?

 Tune in to Me and the Machine’s news: http://www.meandthemachine.co.uk

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