VANITAS10

bioelectronic performance
MINIMALE / / ONDAHALFOSTER



"VANITAS10" is a transmediale work in progress on the dramatic text of the same name, written by Raul Miranda, published in 2006 in the theatrical journal "Gestures: Theory and Practice of Hispanic Theater. No. 42 at the University of Irvine, California USA (Editor: Juan Villegas).

This project is a bio-electronic dialog, (which presents in a transmediale staging, the thesis of “the end of the masculine and the mutation of the subject into a design object”), between two fictional characters activated by the performers and digital programs in use. The text investigates the socio-cultural changes that the free marketing logic and science advaces are creating in our daily lives, transforming the reality internal externally.

"Vanitas" is a dystopia exposed in a play that negotiates between various referents and theatrical ways of image production, becoming an exercise of "Digital Postproduction" where the text is the pretext to present the decline of the western patriarchal culture, and the end of what we understand as “reality”, being replaced by a new visual culture of techno-scientific nature.

In VANITAS, the "Logos", the words and culture, are displayed as a male construct, which is overridden at the exposure of the fact that the cultural tradition vanishes in the infinity of information networks that man himself has created. In this view, the death of God corresponds and necessarily precedes the death of Man, as the logos and the procreative corpus become obsolete given the overabundance of images, discourses, genres and infinite realities.

Through this play, we want to expose the inevitable birth of another system of social relations, determined by the man-machine symbiosis, or the impact of technoscience in the human body, creating a new and cathodic conception of the self, as object design. In this new universe with a paradigm of high technology and scientific development, the concept of "Design" has supplanted the "Metaphor" in its condition of constructor of reality, because the "Idea" has slided into the matter, and "things become what they are" in its tangible reality, creating a cloned object/subject, without any symbolic association. In the “new post-capitalist order”, the possibility to recreate, redesign a life form or a personality, is also a way to programm a new reality, replacing the original reference, its memory, its history.

Sebastian, the tragic hero of Vanitas, is the clone of a non-existent being, and whose sole function is to be an organic folder of information, able to be processed by the digital systems of reality. His memory has been programmed, bombarded with literature, art and cinema, until being totally fractured... because its programmers, Julia, have infected him with the virus of the expiration, where the sonnets of Shakespeare, or the reflections of Barthes, a sight of Khayyam, or an idea or Baudrillard, a film of Jarman and Cronenberg, the verses of Whitman or Artaud, the mystic outbursts of St. Teresa or the ideas of Yourcenar, the words of Virgil or the connection to a chat, have become a cultural remnant, an unnecessary and worthless transaction of information inside the vortex of the late capitalism. This crack of information in Sebastian’s head has turned him mad, sentencing him to disappearance. He is the high culture, lived today as an anomaly, as a sickness that the new cultural order must remove definitely.

This discourse is sustained and complemented by the musical performance of “OndaHalFoster”, wich, through electronic and digital resources, install a digital word processor as their main scenic device (as vocalist). The incorporation of the OndaHalFoster device allows VANITAS10 to delete the presence of actors, replacing them by the computer’s digital word processor, or by the pre-recorded visual record, allowing the performer/Sebastiane to talk with the programs and intervene the images projected with his body.

Raul Miranda
MINIMALE

(Traduccion de Eduardo Pavez)