THe beauty of the Banal
The performance was an adaption of the Thomas Bernhard play, Dene, Ritter, Voss read by four actors.
Key words taken from the play were added into the search imagine of the social photography site FLICKR, using an application called CUNO, that Mediamatic developed which allows users to request photos from flickr.com by means of SMS.
The 17 million photographs on the site, of everything from birthday parties, sunsets to pets, offered an incomparable view of the behavior of the photographing human.
The play, is a reference to the return of the philosopher Wittengenstein to his home after having stayed in a psychiatric asylum, and the banal way his sisters at home deal with that. Even endowed with all their mental wealth, these people can also not rise above the power of everyday details.
The performers were surrounded by video screens, as that part of the text was read, and the key work mentioned, random images tagged with that word were projected live from the flickr site. Creating a sometimes banal or thought provoking contemporary photo landscape constructed from random amateur images.
Martin Butler 