modulus foundation

“Technology doesn’t just do things for us. It does things to us, changing not just what we do but who we are.”

Sherry Turkle, The Documented Life, 2013

Context

The Impossibility of Invisibility is a multifaceted, transdisciplinary, speculative project exploring the emerging field of WiFi sensing: a nascent, barely known and untraceable technology through which ubiquitous WiFi signals become a human radar, detecting and inferring presence, movement, and behavior. The technology harnesses the inescapable interaction of these signals with water molecules inside the human body, which means there is no way for anyone to opt out, nor is it possible to know they are being monitored by it.

The project deploys bleeding-edge WiFi sensing technology, developed by project lead Stelios Manousakis, to critically imagine and embody worlds where its applications are a fact of life. What can these technologies do, and more importantly, who can they do it to, who can they do it for, and how will they change us in the process?

The work

The Impossibility of Invisibility is an hour-long, sci-fi inspired, transdisciplinary performance structured as a non-linear series of episodic vignettes / scenes. It juxtaposes the mundane with the absurd to fantasize on the pervasive impact WiFi sensing applications could have on our lives. The performance challenges the myth of innovation as progress, probing ethical voids and blind spots. It acts both as a warning and a blueprint for the future, calling to reclaim our agency and flood our collective imagination with possibilities beyond those dreamed in corporate boardrooms and research labs.

Through a kaleidoscopic blend of dry information, evocative storytelling, and sensory immersion, the work oscillates between utopian, dystopian, and realist scenarios. Three performers on stage shift fluidly across time, space, and personas to inhabit a variety of situations. The dramaturgy unfolds in fragments, weaving together the past, present, and speculative futures to explore notions of hope and hopelessness, expectation, revelation, transformation, and empowerment. It mutates between different perspectives and performative modalities – lecture-performance, theatrical storytelling, choreography, music, and futuristic opera. At times it talks about its themes directly, others it spirals around them letting the audience fill in the gaps, relate to their own experience, imagine, immerse themselves in fantasy.