Jane – An exercise on Zizeks’ imaginary virtual (2017)

How big is our agency when it comes to understand and change reality?

The construction of our view of the world consists more and more of the items we read, post, share, like and are recommended to us on social media.

How much of this image of the world is real? How free are we when we design it, how big is our awareness of the mediatisation of our understanding of reality? And is this tendency in behaviour a source of knowledge and empathy or precisely the opposite?

The use of social media and the distance felt between one’s own life and the abstract, distant powers ruling over it – from the data-sharing business to the financial handlings that led to the banking crisis – lead an increasing number of people to pull back from their commonly diverse and shared reality; starting instead to base their experience of the real on a parallel, increasingly virtual understanding of things.

An understading defined only by their own needs and preferences (or the ones big data will suggest to them).

In Jane, we try to showcase such a parallel understanding on stage, and we research on different modes of relation between subjects in such an environment. How does this enclosure in our own bubble affect others within it?

Jordi Ribot Thunnissen, choreographer, performer
Charlotte Petersen, choreographer, dancer
Tonio Geugelin, composer