Ezra Veldhuis & Bosse Provoost - All Watched Over by Machines of Loving Grace

Machines, medicine, algorithms: many new technologies seem aimed at social control or the disciplining of labour, rather than giving us new forms of freedom. In All Watched Over by Machines of Loving Grace, Ezra Veldhuis and Bosse Provoost explore freedom and unfreedom in relation to technology, by staging Richard Brautigan’s 1967 poem of the same name.
Ezra Veldhuis and Bosse Provoost explore freedom and unfreedom in relation to technology, by staging Richard Brautigan’s 1967 poem All Watched Over By Machines Of Loving Grace.
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 the entanglement.
At last I am free, I can hardly see in front of me!