Under the guidance of a voice, the audience will look at their familiar city again from a fresh perspective, transforming the public space into a platform for observation and changing the angles to savour the landmark buildings. Meanwhile, the “audience” will inevitably become the “performers” for the other visitors in the street, thus turning into participants who view and perform at the same time. Therefore, despite the fact that in a narrow sense, there is neither a stage nor performers for this series of works, in the broad sense, the city is the real protagonist and all the streets and landmarks passed by are the stage. As for the participating audience and all the people who appear in the streets, they all naturally become the audience of the work and the performers of the city under Rimini Protokoll’s setting.
Co-director Jörg Karrenbauer once mentioned in an interview that when he was creating Remote X, there was indeed a thought-provoking keyword – “Swarm Intelligence”. He pointed out that when individuals with different personalities gather to take actions together, there is in fact always a tangible or intangible system restricting them. It is similar to the digital voice in the work that has been whispering in the audience’s ears, which you can choose to follow or resist. This allows us to reflect on how many matters in our daily lives do we actually have autonomous control over or have we indeed been unwittingly manipulated by technology?
By William W.Y. Chan (Senior art critic, media producer and performance researcher)
This article is excerpted and translated from Chinese.