100% sleep

Performance with Angharad Davies and Katie Fiore

Part of the Barbican's Life Rewired programme, back in 2019 when the worst future we could imagine was AI going bad or something like that.

Our intention was to critique our collective reliance on big tech, and the futility of trying to escape this, in a way that was playful and fun.

The Barbican’s head of tech told us that the Centre incorporates crazy technologies, of the kind that are common in any big building nowadays, but which they've never really linked up because they can't find an ethical way to do so. Big department stores use these technologies to link your face [CCTV/facial recognition] to your SIM card [so they can track you] to your payment card [checkout terminals] to spy on, and predict, your every move. Whilst doing our own background research we discovered that salt water is a natural signal jammer, and so just by getting salty we could bring the whole system to its knees.

We travelled to the coast and collected two litres of sea water. We worked with Roseanna Skikun and Pete Truin, two musicians specialising in sea shanties, to compose a new piece from the lines of ancient mariners' songs, but which spoke to our contemporary experience of connection and isolation. We gathered our audience in the presence of the sea water and learned to sing it. Finally, we went out to the lake surrounding the Barbican Centre as night fell, sea water in hand, and performed this piece to the lake, thereby inviting it to turn salty and interfere with the centre's multiple tracking technologies. The wifi was crappy for the rest of the night so we knew we'd been successful.

On another plane, the project was a success: we'd gathered a group of strangers for an event about Big Tech, and for two hours no-one looked at their phone, and instead learned to sing in harmony with everyone else, a moment of cathartic togetherness. For that sliver of time we were free of our data overlords because we didn't need them, we had each other.

The only documentation we made was a series of black and white photographs from an entirely clockwork camera. Salt is also a natural fixative, and so I was able to process the film using the seawater. This process takes days rather than the 5 mins of chemical fix, and so many of the scratches and visual abherrations are caused by the film becoming incredibly fragile, whilst interacting with other elements in the water.

The magical glow emanating from the jar of seawater in one picture wasn't there in person, but is undoubtedly photographic evidence of our collective power.

Developed as part of Constellations, a year-long programme from FlatTime House and UP Projects

Programmed by The Barbican as part of Life Rewired