A security guard wanders the crowd of the market, vaguely keeping watch, while her two-way radio broadcasts a mysterious voice spouting sound bites about solitude and alienation from the novel, Brave New World (Huxley, 1932). In Huxley’s world, solitude is socially devalued as an unproductive discomfort, but John the Savage reveals solitude as the condition in which grows his faith and individuality.

The guard, a sentry of private space apparently lost in the public market, occasionally speaks back to the voice with reports from the field. The content of the conversation, in effect, is an improvised juxtaposition of past and present, vision and observation, solitude and immersion. It is also a dialog between man and machine, as the voice is a recording set to play spontaneously through a hacked walkie talkie. For passersby, the performance is almost undetectable, save for the notably odd philosophical and personal tone of the guard and the voice resonating from her 2-way radio.

Revisitation Rights was performed at the Abandon Normal Devices (AND) Festival in Preston, U.K., and was supported by Folly and FACT.

Hacked 2-way radio built by Jamie O’Shea.

[ Abandon Normal Devices ]
[ Preston Saturday Market ]