Private Screening

Private Screening is a live performance which considers questions of presence, access, and vulnerability in light of a cultural rush into interfaces of abstraction.

Locked in feedback loops that route through the computational cloud, the mind's means of provisionally defining itself — language — becomes data to be collected, systematized, synthesized, monetized, and maximized for impact. In these conditions, what does it mean to speak and to listen intimately? When the mind is persistently joined with networks, what does it mean to be self-consciously present?

Private Screening is a commissioned work responding to Goat Island's 2007 performance The Lastmaker. It premiered as part of the Goat Island Archive, a retrospective exhibition at the Chicago Cultural Center in June 2019.