Performance, Victoria and Albert Museum, London, 2017 & Diaspore, London, 2017
Sightseer is an experimental participatory performance, originally conceived as part of VVFA’s inaugural live radio broadcast at the V&A museum. The performance invited audience members to create improvised dialogue over a live soundscape, inhabiting roles set out by VVFA on the fictional island ‘Geospiza’. Geospiza is the planetary base for a space elevator, inspired by Soviet rocket scientist Konstantin Tsiolkovsky’s 1889 proposal, linking a satellite in geostationary orbit back to earth. This put in combination with the rapid developments being made in material sciences forms the basis for an exploration into technology, ownership, class and the psychological epiphany described as the overview effect.
Having set out the characters and context for a dialogue audience members are placed into conversation with professional actors and invited to improvise moments based before, after and during a fictional power cut in the island’s infrastructure, responding to live audio illustration from electronic band ‘Worms’.