Catalogue > Un extrait vidéo au hasard

Heston`s Folly is based on the final iconic scene in Planet of the Apes (1968) when the protagonist - activist Margaretta D`Arcy (and the viewer) comes to the realisation that they have been living in the United States all the time. All our cities are nodes now. Mere switching addresses for the movement of capital to lightspeed. But the network architecture hides a cloaked hierarchy. We live in Empire’s feeder cities; our bodies moving in thrall to the packet data thirst of London and New York. Blind to our serfdom, we trace digital paths through the city; our clicking and swiping ever-feeding the foreign machines. Galway AD 3978. The space craft hurtles through time to crash. You disembark, to find a landscape ruled by silverbacks with monkey-mind. Humanity is a legend far left behind. Feature-length, you battle long and hard through sci-fi odyssey. Then, in your final scene - on a beach at the perimeter, you chance upon an Ozymandian ruin. Fall to your knees. In awe at the great reveal. This city too is built on Empire; and Empire, like its grand monuments, can always fall.

Caroline Campbell and Nina McGowan (alongside other collaborators including John Buckley and composer and sound designer Philip Stewart) have been working together since 2012 under the name of Loitering Theatre. Loitering Theatre work across video, text, performance and site-specific installation. Loitering Theatre seek to make the intangible of networks manifest and their work often engages with the hidden structures and abstractions of accelerated networked capitalism. Loitering Theatre use varied techniques to decode and oppose current systems of consensus reality – recent projects have mobilised the affective power of the culture industry’s expanded Hollywood blockbuster; or created radical synapses between future-present sci-fi technologies and lost systems of ancient ritual power. Along the way, time is stretched and bent and technology no longer develops along its linear path.