• by December 2, 2005

With all the online holiday shopping analyses and year-end ad forecasts and projections competing for our attention, not to mention the grueling process of choosing Media and OMMA's agencies of the year weighing heavily on the Minute, we needed to shake things up.

So last night we ventured to Brooklyn to indulge in some performance art at the invitation of two lovely ladies from Hitwise--Lizzie Babarczy, senior marketing manager, and Ginny Redgate, newly appointed vice president of marketing for the online competitive intelligence service. Eric Yuzpe, who heads east coast ad sales for Kaboose, came along as well. Redgate, by the way, hails from Interpublic's MRM Partners and just so happens to sit on the marketing committee of the Brooklyn Academy of Music; Super Vision was presented at the Harvey Theater, one of BAM's awesome theaters.

The performance piece, produced and created by The Builders Association, a performance and media company that's known for its cutting-edge use of text, sound, architecture, digital video and animation, and dbox, a collective of interactive designers and artists, was a truly unusual exploration of the contemporary zeitgeist, our data-infused culture, and the limits to privacy post-9/11.

Super Vision serves up three distinct vignettes: one involving a globe-trotting Nigerian entrepreneur of Indian descent who's methodically stopped at every immigration and customs desk for laborious questioning; another, a young Sri Lankan woman based in New York who talks each day via PC and Webcam with her Alzheimer's-afflicted grandmother who's back home in Colombo; and third, a father who covertly steals the identity of his school-age son to cover the mounting tab on his family's affluent lifestyle. The dad's secret maneuvers end up pushing him out of the picture, leaving his wife and son with a diminished lifestyle and a mountain of debt.

Each vignette was projected against a huge screen with digital animation and special effects. The script, staging, and music were especially striking to this here Minute. The actors appeared on stage and in video projection, along with projections of undulating data streams.

The piece, at least to us, seems to be a meditation on the subjectivity of personal identity, i.e., that identity is essentially a fungible concept--fleeting, highly co-optable, malleable, and transparent. The piece also points up just how willingly we offer up our personal data to marketers, doctors, governments, friends, and employees. The producers have said that Super Vision goes beyond making a statement about "dataveillance" to showing how identities are comprised of very specific bits of data.

One other notable thing: At the beginning of the performance a narrator, who appeared to have tapped into near real-time data on the audience, cited the zip codes and psychographic profiles of ticket-holders by ticket price. It was cool, but also cloying--and represents only the tip of the iceberg in terms of what marketers, Google, Yahoo!, AOL, retailers, and publishers know about us.

Super Vision runs through Dec. 3. Check it out here: http://www.bam.org/events/06SUPE/06SUPE.aspx and at: http://www.superv.org/.

Happy weekend!