We’re standing at the foothills of lurching, unintuitive, disinterested exponentials.
Stood at the bottom looking up. At every interval of drudging ascent.
A heady combination of vertigo and dread.
And boredom.
Waiting that is not a prelude to something else, but is instead a permanent condition.
This performance event is rooted in Samuel Beckett’s 1952 play ‘Waiting for Godot’. Beckett’s fantasy in the latter part of his career was of a play without characters, without actors or dialogue. In that vein, with a few decisive strokes we can draw out the shape of ‘Waiting for Godot’, “A country road, a tree, evening”, and together with a sense of anticipation, get to it, ‘the good stuff’.
And that’s how this production will elapse. An audience will be seated, lights will go down then up elsewhere, the play will start and ultimately finish and there will be no cast of characters but the audience itself.
Each on-stage element is a piece of stage craft made by a practitioner who is uniquely positioned to speak to this time of waiting. We are not post-AI, a world defined by ubiquitous computational intelligence, nor are we pre-AI, a world unblemished by the prospect, where we are is between. A deferred time, one marked by endlessly receding horizons, as yet unmet unbroken promises, asymmetrical compromises.
Klara Kofen is an artist, dramaturg and researcher with a background in intellectual history, whose work explores counterfactual time, technology and affect.
Bethany Rigby is an interdisciplinary designer based in London with research interests centring on extraction, landscapes and communication technologies.
Georgina Voss is an artist and writer whose work explores the presence and politics of large-scale technologies and heavy industry through performance, multimedia installation, and writing.
Stuart Bannocks’ work is currently focused on zines, self-publishing practices, and comics as vehicles for exploring and interrogating architecture and design.
This event is curated by Sol Miles and is presented as part of October’s Digbeth First Friday.
Access: This will be a thirty minute performance in a dark room, rows of seating will be available. At the fifteen minute mark the curtain will be closed for a minute before the play continues into its second act. There will be loud sound and some flashing lights. See our full access guide HERE.
If you have any questions drop us an email on info[at]eastsideprojects.org