Thursday 8p.m.; Friday 8p.m.; Saturday 3p.m., California Theater

Description: Super Vision is a collaboration between the New York-based performance and media ensemble The Builders Association, accompany which exploits the richness of contemporary technologies to extend the boundaries of theater, and dbox, a multidisciplinary studio whose work explores the intersection of visual arts and architecture through 3D digital media.

Super Vision explores the changing nature of our relationship to living in a post-private society where personal electronic information is constantly collected and distributed. These bodies, separate from our physical bodies, and infinitely more accessible, exist in a “data space” which because it is inherently more complex than the visual, remains mostly invisible.

Super Vision makes that space visible. It will illustrate a multi-faceted, multi-layered narrative using the language and technologies of surveillance itself. The data in which every character is immersed both surrounds the story and serves as a “trail” through it. Even before we are born, our personal electronic data begins to accumulate and to circulate. From our first sonogram, to birth certificates, academic records, dental records, credit card purchases, passports, and emails – as we grow, our “data body” grows with us, and becomes an integral part of our identity. In the age of information, we have come to accept, allow, and depend upon this new identity. How do we relate to the growing cloud of data that surrounds us and others?

In SUPER VISION, three stories collide on the edge of the datasphere: 1. As he crosses successive borders, a solitary traveler gradually is forced to reveal all of his personal information, until his identity becomes transparent, with no part of his life left outside the bounds of dataveillance. 2. A young woman, addicted to the white noise of constant connection, maintains a long-distance relationship with her Grandmother. As she makes efforts to digitally archive her Grandmother’s past, the grandmother slips into senility. The young woman is left to discover what remains of her Grandmother’s life – and her own – outside the realm of data. 3. A father covertly exploits his young son’s personal data to meet the demands of the family’s lifestyle. This ploy escalates beyond the father’s control, until he is compelled to disappear. His wife and son are left with a starkly diminished data portrait, and his escape is shadowed by the long reach of the datasphere.

In telling these interwoven stories, SUPER VISION makes the invisible world of data dazzlingly visible, radically redefining the identity of each character as they are viewed through the prism of the datasphere. This is the hidden context of our contemporary world. But the rules of this new data world are unclear—where will it take us? And who will we become?