We use cookies to distinguish you from other users and to provide you with a better experience on our websites. Close this message to accept cookies or find out how to manage your cookie settings.
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 12 November 2018
Now a decade old, Rimini Protokoll's 100% City continues to stage civilians as statistical samples. Considering the project as a series, this paper proposes that ‘seriality’ governs not just the project's touring model, but also its creation of individuals, populations and a homogeneous group of ‘diverse’ metropolises. These serializations are a foundational part of the project of statistical reason. Surveying the nineteenth-century origins of these practices and their early public articulations, and contrasting these practices with the newly emerging regime of ‘big data’, this paper argues that this serial logic is in fact a nostalgic one. 100% City’s celebration of statistics, however troubling, appears as a comforting articulation of a social model now dissolving in favour of algorithmic enumerations of peoples. The statistical project has long been tied to the theatre, while data analysis may articulate a limit to theatrical representation.
This essay was developed with the help of the 2017 American Society for Theater Research (ASTR) Working Group on Extra/Ordinary Bodies of Data and Surveillance, convened by Elise Morrison and James Harding. My breakout group – Lindsay Brandon-Hunter, Jacob Gallagher-Ross and Paul Rae – provided essential provocation for this argument. Many thanks to the precise, clear feedback from my anonymous reviewers, and to Shane Denson here at Stanford.
2 Garde, Ulrike and Mumford, Meg, Theatre of Real People: Diverse Encounters at Berlin's Hebbel am Ufer and Beyond (New York: Bloomsbury, 2016)CrossRefGoogle Scholar.
3 Laera, Margherita, ‘Reaching Athens: Performing Participation and Community in Rimini Protokoll's Prometheus in Athens’, Performance Research, 16, 4 (2011), pp. 46–51CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Fragkou, Marissia and Hager, Philip, ‘Staging London: Participation and Citizenship on the Way to the 2012 Olympic Games’, Contemporary Theatre Review, 23, 4 (2013), pp. 532–41CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Zaiontz, Keren, ‘Performing Visions of Governmentality: Care and Capital in 100% Vancouver’, Theatre Research International, 39, 2 (Summer 2014), pp. 101–19CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Paterson, Eddie, ‘Bodies of Data: Informatics in Contemporary Performance’, Performance Paradigm, 12 (2016), pp. 52–69Google Scholar.
4 Laera, ‘Reaching Athens’, pp. 50–1.
5 Fragkou and Hager, ‘Staging London’, p. 537.
6 Zaiontz, ‘Performing Visions of Governmentality’, pp. 103–4. Emphasis in the original.
7 I am not alone: most of the videos have over a thousand views each. The especially popular 100% Rīga has 9,216 views as of writing, a number that approaches one percent of Riga's population. 100%’s streaming audience appears analogous in number, then, to its in-person counterpart.
8 See Menon, Jisha, ‘Calling Local/Talking Global: The Cosmo-politics of the Call-Center Industry’, Women & Performance, 23, 2 (2013), pp. 162–77CrossRefGoogle Scholar.
9 Paterson, ‘Bodies of Data’, p. 60.
10 Sarah Bay-Cheng, ‘The Algorithms of Democracy’, 100 Years of Now, 13 January 2017. n.p.
11 All translations rely on the videos’ English subtitles.
12 Rimini Protokoll, 100% Cork, video documentation, Vimeo, 25 August 2013.
13 Rimini Protokoll, 100% Amsterdam, video documentation, Vimeo, 31 July 2015.
14 Rimini Protokoll, 100% Wien/Vienna, video documentation, Vimeo, 12 November 2012.
15 Rimini Protokoll, 100% Berlin, video documentation, Vimeo, 12 November 2012.
16 Rimini Protokoll, 100% Philadelphia, video documentation, Vimeo, 25 November 2014; 100% São Paulo, video documentation, Vimeo, 8 August 2016; 100% Yogyakarta, video documentation, Vimeo, 21 April 2016; 100% Kopenhagen, video documentation, Vimeo, 31 March 2016.
17 Rimini Protokoll, 100% Darwin, video documentation, Vimeo, 10 Septamber 2016.
18 Koczy, Daniel, ‘“Faces behind the Numbers”: Rimini Protokoll and Daniel Koczy Discuss 100% City’, Contemporary Theatre Review, 25, 2 (2015). n.pGoogle Scholar.
19 Ibid.
20 Rimini Protokoll, 100% Amsterdam.
21 Rimini Protokoll, 100% Rīga, video documentation, Vimeo, 17 October 2016.
22 Rimini Protokoll, 100% São Paulo.
23 Rimini Protokoll, 100% Gwangju, video documentation, Vimeo, 25 August 2014.
24 Rimini Protokoll, 100% Melbourne, video documentation, Vimeo, 20 September 2012.
25 Rimini Protokoll, 100% Penang, video documentation, Vimeo, 18 April 2016.
26 Rimini Protokoll, 100% Montréal, video documentation, Vimeo, 4 July 2017; 100% Karlsruhe, video documentation, Vimeo, 12 November 2012; 100% Paris, video documentation, Vimeo, 9 December 2014.
27 Koczy, ‘Faces behind the Numbers’, n.p.
28 Kelleter, Frank, ‘Five Ways of Looking at Popular Seriality’, in Kelleter, ed., Media of Serial Narrative (Columbus: Ohio State University Press, 2017), pp. 7–35, here p. 31Google Scholar.
29 Sartre, Jean-Paul, Critique of Dialectical Reason, Vol. I, trans. Sheridan-Smith, Alan (London: Verso, 2004), p. 256Google Scholar.
30 Sartre, Critique of Dialectical Reason, p. 265.
31 Young, Iris Marion, ‘Gender as Seriality: Thinking about Women as a Social Collective’, Signs, 19, 3 (Spring 1994), pp. 713–38, here p. 724CrossRefGoogle Scholar.
32 Han, Gil-Soo, Nouveau-Riche Nationalism and Multiculturalism in Korea: A Media Narrative Analysis (London: Routledge, 2016), p. 12Google Scholar.
33 Lee, Hyunjung, ‘An Eternal Parting: Staging Internal Diaspora, Performing South Korean Nationalism’, Theatre Research International, 41, 3 (Autumn 2016), pp. 231–44, here p. 232CrossRefGoogle Scholar.
34 Anderson, Benedict, Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism (London: Verso Books, 2016), p. 145Google Scholar.
35 Chatterjee, Partha, ‘Anderson's Utopia’, diacritics, 29, 4 (Winter 1999), pp. 128–34, here p. 129CrossRefGoogle Scholar.
36 For example, Ben Doherty, ‘Australia Should Bring Manus and Nauru Refugees to Immediate Safety, UN Says’, The Guardian, 9 November 2017, at https://www.theguardian.com/australia-news/2017/nov/10/australia-should-bring-manus-and-nauru-refugees-to-immediate-safety-un-says, accessed 24 September 2018.
37 Chatterjee, ‘Anderson's Utopia’, p. 133.
38 Hopkins, D. J. and Solga, Kim, ‘Introduction: Borders, Performance, and the Global Urban Condition’, in Hopkins and Solga, eds., Performance and the Global City (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2013), pp. 1–15, here p. 9CrossRefGoogle Scholar.
39 Yúdice, George, The Expediency of Culture (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2003), pp. 174–81Google Scholar.
40 Rimini Protokoll, 100% Darwin, video documentation, Vimeo, 10 September 2015.
41 Foucault, Michel, The Order of Things (New York: Random House, 1970), p. 268Google Scholar.
42 Paterson, ‘Bodies of Data’, p. 60.
43 Zaiontz, ‘Performing Visions of Governmentality’, p. 108.
44 Hacking, Ian, The Taming of Chance (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990), p. 2CrossRefGoogle Scholar.
45 Ibid.
46 Ibid, pp. 64–72.
47 Porter, Theodore, Trust in Numbers: The Pursuit of Objectivity in Science and Public Life (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1996), p. 37Google Scholar.
48 Quoted in Hacking, The Taming of Chance, p. 105.
49 Sekula, Allan, ‘The Body and the Archive’, October, 39 (Winter 1986), pp. 3–64, here p. 20CrossRefGoogle Scholar.
50 Ibid., p. 34. Emphasis in the original.
51 Porter, Trust in Numbers, p. 83.
52 Rudder, Christian, Dataclysm: Love, Sex, Race, and Identity: What Our Online Lives Tell Us about Our Offline Selves (New York: Random House, 2014)Google Scholar.
53 Anonymous, ‘Data, Data Everywhere’, The Economist, 27 February, 2010, pp. 3–5.
54 Deleuze, Gilles, ‘Postscript on the Societies of Control’, October, 59 (Winter 1992), pp. 3–7, here p. 5Google Scholar. Emphasis in the original.
55 Causey, Matthew, ‘Postdigital Performance’, Theatre Journal, 68, 3 (Autumn 2016), pp. 427–41, here p. 439CrossRefGoogle Scholar.
56 Rae, Paul, ‘Lawful Espials? Edward Snowden's Hamlet’, Theatre Journal, 68, 3 (Autumn 2016), pp. 335–55, here p. 344CrossRefGoogle Scholar.
57 Rouvroy, Antoinette, ‘The End(s) of Critique: Data Behaviourism versus Due Process’, in Hildebrandt, Mireille and de Vries, Katja, eds., Privacy, Due Process and the Computational Turn: The Philosophy of Law Meets the Philosophy of Technology (New York: Routledge, 2013), pp. 143–68, here p. 147Google Scholar. Emphasis in the original.
58 Christopher Ingraham, ‘Scientists Can Now Figure Out Detailed, Accurate Neighborhood Demographics Using Google Street View Photos’, Wonkblog, Washington Post, 30 November 2017, at https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/wonk/wp/2017/11/30/scientists-can-now-figure-out-detailed-accurate-neighborhood-demographics-using-google-street-view-photos/?utm_term=.9dd91f45a971, accessed 24 September 2018.
59 Peter Crawley, ‘Cork's Vital Statistics’, Irish Times, 1 July 2013, at https://www.irishtimes.com/cork-s-vital-statistics-1.1449418, accessed 24 September 2018.
60 Rae, ‘Lawful Espials?’, p. 345.
61 Causey, ‘Postdigital Performance’, p. 440.
62 Bay-Cheng, ‘The Algorithms of Democracy’, n.p.
63 Birringer, Johannes, ‘Really Actually Windy: On Environments, Technologies, and Dividual Performances, Theatre Journal, 68, 4 (Winter 2016), pp. 633–47, here p. 638CrossRefGoogle Scholar.
64 See Fred Turner, ‘On Accelerationism’, Public Books, 1 September 2016, at http://www.publicbooks.org/on-accelerationism/, accessed 24 September 2018.
65 Rimini Protokoll, 100% Braunschweig, video documentation, Vimeo, 23 July 2013.
66 Latour, Bruno, ‘Why Has Critique Run Out of Steam? From Matters of Fact to Matters of Concern’, Critical Inquiry, 30 (Winter 2004), pp. 225–48, here p. 225CrossRefGoogle Scholar.
