https://vimeo.com/83932523 (at the Self -managed Embros theater, 2013)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TWGAQGlbyH0&feature=youtu.be (Deree College, Athens , 2015)
Dance-Banoptikon, is a hybrid form of performance that emerged through the collaboration of the dancevacuum collective and the media arts collective Personal Cinema. The dancers are mainly migrants that are living in Athens, having experience of the daily problems of exclusion, discrimination and violence, which they express on scene in partnership with Greek dancers.
Through this performance we aim to combine the game with every day reality. Dancer's bodies are moving continuously from the "state of avatar" in the daily reality of people that are struggling to survive and vice versa. “There are moments that we forget who we are and what happens around us. There are moments that define our evolution and often overwhelm us. There are moments that the game is us and we are the game. Who may provide answers? We are challenged to play as supposed to and to react as we are supposed to. The dialogue between real human bodies and digital entities could possibly lead to an altered state of consciousness beyond than that which is permitted. Maybe?”
The Banoptikon videogame project is related to the broader E.U. research program MIG@NET. The program searches and examines different aspects of current migrational politics and the issues that are generated from the power relations between migrants, "locals" and authorities, which are weaving and constructing the European canvas of this new struggle field. The central axis of this struggle concerns the digitalisation process of migration flows and consequently, the transformations that occur to the different actors and the urban territories.
The videogame Banoptikon, aspires to simulate social and political situations referring to migration flow, which take place inside cities, networks, rural areas and above all to human bodies. Because bodies are the subjects on which old and new technologies are applied and therefore bodies remain the basic topos of the battlefield.
We are facing the melting point between bodies in move on one hand and digital technologies of control on the other. A situation where the bodies become data, and thus become subject of control, but at the same time the data are materialised and become bodies. As the team of the Border Crossing state:
"So, precisely because the migrants carry the border, because they embody the border - especially in the form of their fingers - they cannot entirely cross it. However, what they do is to transgress the border at the same time as incorporating it."
Links:
Banoptikon: https://banoptikon.personalcinema.org/
dancevacuum: http://dancevacuum.blogspot.gr/p/blog-page_2201.html
