©ALCULATED TO DEATH is a part-acoustic, part-electronic score that uses government documents obtained from WikiLeaks – including the Comprehensive Economic Trade Agreement (CETA) and the UK Data Communications Bill – to weigh the infinite possibilities of the internet against its political and human cost.
The piece, written by Sebastian Laskowski, features 5 instrumentalists, 4 singers, and a laptop musicians.
As part of a performance at Tete a Tete Festival in 2014 funded by Arts Council England, I was hired as a projectionist to develop and perform the physical experience of audience surveillance through the use of live videography and audience participation of social media projected on walls.
The lyrics of the opera were typed through a twitter feed, to mimick the experience of reading lines from Wikileaks files in real time through social networks. The audience were encouraged to participate with a dedicated hashtag in response to those lyrics, as if it were a conversation on Twitter.
By operating the live camera, I performed the role of a video journalist whose work is been watched by the higher authorities. The lens would point toward the performers singing as if it was a statement read out in a press conference, whilst also following the audience who usually fill "cutaway" shots.
Both visuals were projected onto the walls to create that "surveillance" effect, leaving the audience questioning who does the surveillance - the media, internet, government, or all three?
The opera festival was reviewed by the Telegraph, which mentioned our performance as one of three "contrasting" offerings:
Calculated to Death is an attempt by Sebastian Laskowski to make an agitprop cantata out of protest against CETA, an international trade agreement which dangerously assumes the right to intrude into our cyber-lives, raising familiar questions about the extent of surveillance and data storage in modern society. But Laskowski’s bluntly energetic minimalist score did the business unpretentiously, as a quartet of singers chanted the more terrifying aspects of such Big Brother grabs on our private lives. It didn’t last long enough to become bludgeoningly tedious, and there was no mistaking the passionate commitment which motivated it.