ALICE is a performative installation, inspired by Lewis Carroll’s book Through the Looking-Glass, and What Alice Found There, in which the audience becomes both observer and performer. Entering as a small group of ‘spect-actors’, they find themselves in a transreal environment, where the physical and the virtual gaze at each other. What is real in this world that holds a mirror up to your face? Did you dream the same dream as others did?

The installation unfolds across two successive waiting rooms and a central digital mirror. Leaving one waiting room only to discover another introduces a slightly surreal, absurd logic, close to that of dreams, where familiar situations become uncanny. Hidden Kinect cameras for 3D scanning, live coding and voice-to-text transcription, generative text, a synthetic voice, a 1990s telephone, and multi-channel audio allow the environment to respond in real time to the audience. What they bring into the work can become part of it: their live image in the digital mirror, a position in space, a dream that has just been spoken. The installation can then take up and transform this material. The digital mirror might shift the point of view, while spoken language becomes written words that progressively alter over time.

Through this constellation of analogue and digital elements, ALICE creates a situation that can feel private and public at the same time. A small number of people enter together and share the space closely, while their bodies are being scanned and parts of their experience can become visible to everybody. Through telephone conversations with a synthetic female voice, audience members are invited to share their dreams, which appear as written text in the digital mirror in real time.

Alice, the mirror and the self

ALICE began with research into how phenomena from quantum mechanics could become material for a new work. I was particularly interested in the relation between observer and observed, and in superposition: the possibility of multiple states existing at the same time, until a measurement takes place. These ideas opened questions around perception and the role of the observer in what appears to be real.

While reading Through the Looking-Glass, I realised that many of the themes and questions I was already researching through quantum mechanics were also present in Carroll’s book, though in a completely different language. I decided to jump into Alice and analyse the book around these overlaps. I started tracing moments where perspective changes, names lose their stability, rules shift, language follows another logic, memory behaves strangely, or an action and its consequence no longer seem to belong together. The book became a way of thinking further through these questions and imagining how they could take shape inside the installation.

Questions around the self started becoming more present through this process. Who is the person being observed, and how much does that depend on the point from which they are seen? What happens when your image is taken by a machine and returned to you altered? In the notes this starts appearing through ideas of twins, altered faces, different points of view, the self seen from behind, past and present appearing together, or the possibility of sharing the same reality with another version of yourself. In the installation, the audience could also see itself live from perspectives its own body could not occupy. Point of view itself became something that could be recomposed and continuously shifted.

One of the thoughts that stayed with me was that what we see in a mirror is not us, but neither is it something completely separate from us. The reflection is part of how we recognise ourselves; so is the image another person has of us, a name, a memory, a photograph or a digital image. In my notes I find written: “I exist because you can see me – I exist through your look at me.” The digital mirror became the place where some of these questions could actually manifest.

Dreams, memory and language

Dreams became increasingly important while developing ALICE. I was interested in what happens between having a dream, remembering it and trying to tell it to someone else. Already in that movement, there can be several versions of what has happened. A memory does not necessarily return intact, and putting it into words gives it another form.

I was also looking at the Greek tradition of the Kazamias, a popular annual magazine or almanac that traditionally includes an Oneirokritis, an alphabetical dream interpreter giving meanings and predictions to things that appear in dreams. I was interested in the contrast between something as private and unstable as a dream and this attempt to organise it into fixed meanings. The same dream can exist as an experience, as a memory of that experience, and as the story we make when trying to tell it.

These questions found their way into ALICE through the phone conversations. The person who picked up the phone could hear the synthetic voice asking them to share a dream, while the others in the room could only hear the person speaking. Phrases from the dream appeared in real time inside the digital mirror, together with the live-reflected room and the audience. Individual words began shifting into synonyms, which in turn kept shifting into further synonyms, progressively carrying the dream away from what had originally been spoken. The private act of sharing a dream with a voice on the other end of the line was therefore taking place in front of others, with the spoken words simultaneously appearing within the shared visual space.

Devising ALICE

ALICE was devised by I/O through about six months of workshops, technical sessions and tryouts with invited audiences. I worked closely with David Jonas, who developed the creative coding and real-time digital system, and Roelof Pothuis, who worked on the set and light design. I was working on the artistic direction, composition and sound, while the form of the installation was being shaped through the exchange between these different parts. A possibility emerging from the coding could change the dramaturgy, a spatial or lighting decision could affect the digital environment, and what happened during an audience tryout could send us back to redesign parts of the work.

Part of the research was about the form itself: how a work could exist between performance and installation, with a duration of approximately 30 minutes and a new small group entering for each performance. Several groups could therefore experience the work over the course of a day. We were also the hidden operators, following each group, cuing several elements and intervening live when necessary. The structure remained recognisable from one performance to another, but what happened inside it was never entirely identical.

ALICE was commissioned by Gaudeamus and funded through the Nieuwe Makers subsidy of the Performing Arts Fund NL. It premiered at Gaudeamus Muziekweek in 2017, where it was performed 20 times, and was later presented 8 times at November Music.

Devised by I/O
Thanasis Deligiannis, artistic direction, composition & sound design
Roelof Pothuis, set & light design
David Jonas, creative coding
Daan Hazendonk, sound & video technician
Clare Gallagher, sound advisor

Visit the project’s website at www.aliceperformance.com.
Here you can read an article on NRC about ALICE.