@Drama goes digital
A few thoughts on the «Analogization of the digital» and "Highway Hypnosis"
Much of the digital technology that has sourrounded us for a while, have now become almost “as one would expect” and “natural”. Things that only a few years earlier appeared as “mindblowing”, “momentuous” and “epoch-making”, have become automized parts of our daily lives.
Suddenly, and almost unnoticeable, the “digital rooms” become our everyday rooms. The rounded LCD -displays are like windows; video-calls from the other side of the globe - merely a tuesday- trifle. It’s this trivial normalization of the digital revolutions that has inspired the dramaturgical strategies for Highway Hypnosis: When video is captured, synchronized and combined via simple applications; meant for private use; when skype-communication and face-time becomes a dialogue between stage and audience, and when the sensitive and slightly different mobile cameras are pushed to their limit against the old-fashioned theatre lighting; conjuring up new colors and patterns, that`s when a subtile and mutual offset appears: peculiarly, the old become new and the new become old.
Seemingly unnoticeable encounters like these (I have, in a deliberately difficult manner, called it “the analogization of the digital”) tells us something about how we create new forms of communication, a communication that creates and defines us, our personal worlds, and - at last- our relationships to each other. For: “what does it really mean being close?”. And when do things become history?
In Highway Hypnosis, the video -this relic from the 1990s- is put side by side with the piano from the 1790s. And as they reminisce about bygone times; the piano encourages the video in that it has now, finally become the instrument it was perhaps meant to be; and yeah, that it no longer needs to strive to be cool and attractive, but instead utilized in a calm and gentle manner - for something reasonable!
And we who listen to this conversation, will also be reminded that we are part of this history, where everything - and before we know it - get draped in the veil of the past.
Tore Vagn Lid