Influence, or get influenced.
Asklöf Prescott, Kauppinen, Niemistö, Turpeinen, 2020
The Cabinet is a performance about the power of social media and identity. It will premiere on the 23th October 2020 at TEHDAS Teatteri (Turku, Finland). The performance examines human behavior in social media – the search for meaning and the struggle to exist in the social media stream. The Cabinet ensemble approaches questions: who am I, is my identity fixed or in motion, do I have control over myself and my actions, can I influence others – and/or has somebody already put a spell on me?
The material for the performance is build upon the research and roleplay the artists execute in their Instagram profiles. These profiles are launched in February 2020 by the performance artists Tanja Turpeinen, Riikka Niemistö, Silja Kauppinen and Moa Asklöf Prescott. The artists use the social media network as a mirror to test and to improve their self images. During the process they keep asking themselves on a daily basis: what has a hold on me?
The performance in TEHDAS Teatteri is a 3D platform to play with the social media discoveries – to reconstruct the artists’ most accepted and admired, in other words the most powerful parts of identities into self portraits. These portraits move and communicate in the stage scenery that expands and deepens beyond the Instagram frame size. The two mediums, performance and social media are paralleled also through the question of algoritm. By what logic could the stream of performance highlight or dunk content? What could be the algoritm of performance?
Alongside the performance in TEHDAS Teatteri a documentary is made out of the Cabinet’s artistic process. How the documentary is linked to the performance is still an open question and under consideration.
Mellanmjölk Productions 