The End Product

w/ Myriam Bleau

35min AV Performance

Data, privacy, and networked society for profit.

“The remarkable questions here concern the facts that our lives are rendered as behavioral data in the first place; that ignorance is a condition of this ubiquitous rendition; that decision rights vanish before one even knows that there is a decision to make; that there are consequences to this diminishment of rights that we can neither see nor foretell; that there is no exit, no voice, and no loyalty, only helplessness, resignation, and psychic numbing.”

-Shoshana Zuboff, “The Age of Surveillance Capitalism”

The End Product is an audiovisual performance exposing our daily online experiences and our ambiguous relationship with social media. Through multiple tableaux, it explores different forms of data extractivism, from personal information and physical appearance to location, social interactions and even financial information. The performance, oscillating between humor and malaise, tunes into the particular rhythm of our dopamine-inducing online habits, while diving into the hidden mechanisms behind the ‘feed’, who decides and controls the content, who profits from it, and who endures its effects. The banality and boredom of being online, often sublimated through the broken promise of endless infotainment, is exposed in plain as the performers take the time to check their emails and play games on stage, screens facing the public.

The sheer scale of hoarded data available online is exposed through a deep dive into one of the performer’s entire geolocalisation history over 10 years, followed by a vertiginous acceleration and accumulation of the entire Facebook ad purchase dataset since 2019 (updated before each show for the current country). Spam, the unanimous scourge of the connected era, is unabashedly assumed here, periodically interrupting the audio visual stream and bringing the performance to an unexpected and grinding halt, exposing not only how aggressive it is, but also how accepting we have become of these invasive forms of advertising. Issues of data privacy and bypassing consent are explored through an initial outlandish Terms of Service contract, culminating at the end with an integration of audiences’ faces on screen thanks to their unintended authorization.

Paying homage to Richard Serra and Carlota Fay Schoolman’s 1973 short video ‘Television Delivers People’, the performance The End Product reflects on how social media continues this tactic of delivering people as products to advertisers and if, perhaps, our data might be more valuable than the services we give it to, often freely and half-knowingly.

We acknowledge the support of: -Canada Council for the Arts -Auvergne-Rhône-Alpes Region through the SCAN grant -L’Espace Gantner (Territoire de Belfort). Residency support from iMal, Interstice, Sporobole and Recto-Verso.