< / cl!ck >

< /cl!ck > is an interactive, multimedia installation that explores how culture, personality, and subconscious bias are revealed by our online behavior: our clicks, likes, follows, views, swipes, and profiles. It's dance, code, and electronic music inspired by the intricate ways that we curate our online selves, and the content we see as a result. The performance combines amplified narcissim, parodied action, and uncomfortable cultural awareness.

The space is set up with two large, semi translucent screens, onto which are projected two browsers; the effect is something like being caught inside a laptop. The performers are placed intentionally on-screen or off screen throughout the piece. Their interactions with the screens and with each other include a parodied mash-up of the gestures we use to interact with our devices, contemporary dance forms, and performative actions. Our movement references include steps from A Chorus Line, Béyonce videos, emojis, professional football players, the Rockettes, and Instagram Yoga influencers. They make fun of themselves and their peers with enthusiasm, cushioned by their digital environment and a seeming lack of consequence.

However, there are consequences, and they are real, and soon the work spirals into an abstractly prismatic depiction of the ways in which internet culture can be intensely harmful. At first our crushing loneliness and desperate need for attention is funny. However, as it gets more personal and more violent, the gleeful ways in which we relate to this behavior become disturbing. The world we are witnessing is cruel, as well as inescapably gendered and whitewashed.

<cl!ck> is contemporary dance run through a distortion pedal, spun through hundreds of lines of code, filtered through Facebook’s algorithm, and seen through the lens of a candid take on 21st Century reality. By anthropomorphizing our digital experience, < /cl!ck > turns screen-based activity into a performative demonstration of our digital behavior. It reveals the implications of our collective social preferences and subconscious daily activity in the digital sphere, while simultaneously forcing us to question their profound impact upon ourselves as individuals.