All Watched Over by Machines of Loving Grace

I like to think (and 
the sooner the better!) 
of a cybernetic meadow 
 
where mammals and computers 
live together in mutually 
programming harmony 
like pure water 
touching clear sky. 
 
I like to think 
(right now please!) 
of a cybernetic forest 
filled with pines and electronics 
where deer stroll peacefully 
past computers 
as if they were flowers 
with spinning blossoms. 
 
I like to think 
(it has to be!) 
of a cybernetic ecology 
where we are free of our labors 
and joined back to nature, 
returned to our mammal 
brothers and sisters, 
and all watched over 
by machines of loving grace. 

- Richard Brautigan 

In All Watched Over by Machines of Loving Grace, Ezra Veldhuis & Bosse Provoost explore freedom and unfreedom in relation to technology, by staging Richard Brautigan's 1967 poem of the same name. 

Machines, medicine, algorithms: many new technologies seem aimed at social control or the disciplining of labour, rather than giving us new forms of freedom. Does this mean Brautigan's dream is dead? Are we already living in a totally perverted realisation of it? Or does the freedom promised in his dream still hold potential?  

The performance oscillates between utopia and scepticism, between ecstasy  and disillusionment: we see a "cybernetic ecology" in which it is not always clear whether the entanglements between people, materials and devices are symbiotic or conflictual. The light seems to want to deceive and hypnotise, the music asks us to trust and let go. The question is not whether we are entangled, but how we suffer, dance and waver within that entanglement. 

At last I am free, I can hardly see in front of me!

Duration: +- 60 min 
Language no problem 
Trigger warning: this performance uses stroboscopic light and a smoke machine.