About Project

 

In our daily lives, ordinary objects around us carry various sensors that function like agents, taking on many roles in the digital realm. These include thermostats, robot vacuums, smart cleaners, intelligent home assistants, and a wide variety of children's toys. Continuously observing and collecting human experiences, these sensors convert everyday life into valuable data for future use. Gradually, our lives are transformed into behavioural data, a conversion process made ubiquitous by our ignorance. Our bodies, homes, and cities are thus unwittingly transformed into surplus behavioural capital—this is surveillance capitalism. Surveillance capitalism is a new economic order in which human experience is treated as free ingredients, readily extracted, predicted, and sold through various commercial practices.

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This project uses theatrical practices to invite participants (audiences) into a self-service performance, transforming ignorance into active inquiry: monitoring how surveillance capitalism operates. Through this transdisciplinary theatrical project, we ask questions such as: Is human experience genuinely a free resource available for extraction? How is individual experience converted into behavioural data? What information lies hidden within human behavioural data?

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Furthermore, throughout the ongoing creative process of this project, we also examine the technology behind behavioural data. When technology and society mutually shape each other, how do embedded values and decisions in technological design impact civil society? In what ways does technology shape power dynamics? How are these power structures leveraged in surveillance capitalism? Lastly, are there alternative possibilities in how we use technology?