Echo Chamber {Performance}

_{Echo Chamber performance was manifested as a way to expand on and explore the ideas we explored in the film. The mirror box, the symbolism of the echo chamber, becomes a physical chamber space. The audience is locked outside, only able to observe through gaps, slits, and panels; they become silent, unseen adjudicators in the dark, set against performers painfully illuminated in bursting white light from within. Specimens in petri dishes, exhibits in a vitrine. The performers, despite being starkly illuminated, are in the dark to this constant observation, seeing only each other and an infinity of their own reflections stretching out in front of them from the hall of mirrors they’re inside.}

_{Performers hold VHS video cameras with long wires snaking over the floor and plinth, each feed streaming to two screens outside. The distant inside of the box come outside, and we see their POV displayed large on screens. We wanted to really contrast the intimacy of video on the screen with the dispassionate, detached observation through the mirror. The performers initially coldly observe the space, then themselves, then each other, using the camera as a kind of digital eye.}

_{They move and writhe. They mirror each other’s movements, slipping in and out of sync like avatars, virtual reality holograms. We were really interested in the idea of the double, the doppelgänger, the splitting of the self: how your image is reflected back to you online, how we all start to become doubles of each other, homogenised amalgamations of algorithmic selection.}

_{The doubles get closer, prowling, stalking, then meet in the middle: a tangle of wires and bodies. Fucking with a camera, zooming into mouths, eyes. Penetrating with the gaze of the lens.}

^{The lights in the box cut to black at the crescendo: a hard stop, a computer crash, access denied. When the inside of the box is in darkness, the audience can only see their own reflections in the mirror looking back at them.}

Performers: Velvet & Vex Tape

Watch the footage film here