Real, Compared To What?

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by Paul Bass | Jun 22, 2007 1:18 pm

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Posted to: Arts

The nonstop media mania of god is a dj, currently playing at the Yale Summer Cabaret, feel like it takes place on some distant planet, where cameras and turntables and screens continually record and broadcast every moment of life. Perhaps it’s an apocalyptic vision of the future merging of humans with technology. Or maybe it’s the present, and we don’t recognize that we already live on this set—where Youtube, blogs, 24-hour global capital markets and news channels, tabloid confessionals, traffic cams, blogs and the pornographication of popular culture have have destroyed intimacy and buried reality in a grave marked “Reality TV.”

You wonder as much as you watch the play’s two human characters—a DJ (Carter Gill) and a VJ (Erica Sullivan)—turn their lives over 24/7 to the outside world.

Click on the play arrow at top of this story to watch Gill riff on the play’s title.

Click on the play arrow here for a meditation (to call it “extended” is akin to calling a small coffee at Starbucks a “tall”) on the overexposed life.

p(clear).

In an era in which people compete to allow cameras to record their most intimate moments, intimacy itself is the casualty. Click on the play arrow to see if you agree.

p(clear).

Playwright Falk Richter’s arguments are best made in response to the actual words spoken. Those responses come in silence—what’s shown, not said, in the coolness of the characters’ kisses, on the screens filling the room, in the characters of the the cameras themselves. The cameras serve as more than props. They don’t just record the action; they steer it. The role of the human actors is to act as cool as possible for the cameras. Click on the play arrow here to judge: Is cool worth it?

p(clear).

To some extent god is a dj isn’t a new story. Tensions between lovers aren’t a new story. And every since the dawn of a mass media, people who write about their lives, record their lives, or allow others to document their lives have allowed their experiences, by definition, to be mediated—to become a product. What’s new is the scale, a world of total commodification of experience. Click on the play arrow here to watch how the play’s dj deals with his fear that his lover might someday leave him. He creates a product in advance: He records a hit song in advance. He controls the script by writing the official version. By this point, the quest to distinguish reality from fiction has been all but abandoned.

p(clear). god is a dj runs through June 30. Click here for details on times and tickets.

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