Digital Sweat / Light Songs
The Rootstein Hopkins Parade Ground, London, 2011
A live performance based on Gabo Guzzo’s writings and voiced by Joseph Bader, Ned Berry, Laura Harling, Plamen Kirtchev, Jessica Peace and Guy Warren-Thomas.
Based on Gabo Guzzo’s writings, the work introduces the strange relationship between three people engaged in an ambiguous conversation where it isn’t clear if the discussion runs animated by each other’s thoughts or it is just a random carousel of distanced soliloquies. And yet, sometimes we get the impression that those three beings are in fact just one…
The work is thought as an attempt to squeeze matter and time, engaging with the idea of living into an Eternal Present. As Roland Barthes explained, ‘the contemporary is the untimely’; the aim for the eternal present is actually well compatible with the model of today’s capitalism and the new social dynamic on the Internet. The eternal present is also boosted by the new individual ability to invent one’s own reality and to daydream. Manuel Castells said that the reconciliation of present-eternal merging the biological individual and the cosmological whole can only be reached through the merge of all times, from the creation of ourselves to the end of the universe. Timelessness is the recurring theme in the cultural expressions of our era, whether in the ubiquity we experience on the internet, in the images we receive at once from every corner of the earth or in the echoes of electronic spiritualism. According to Michel Maffesoli ‘we could never stress enough the relation involving polytheism of values, habitual paganism and appreciation of the present moment when all potentialities should be experienced’. The consequence of acting in the eternal present is the development of a perception model ‘without memory’.