Love and Information.

photo courtesy of the team of love & information. 

Last week, I went to watch the Melbourne University college’s production of Love and Information. A play that was written by Carolyn Churchill to represent the ideas of relationship and technology in a multimedia world, specifically where humans become reliant on this way of living.

Throughout seeing the production, I thought it resonated with not only the media one course but also this week’s reading on attention. If we are talking literally – I don’t have a particularly strong attention span. To be honest, I feel like technology and the internet is to blame but it has gone downhill from when I was a child. In talking about the production – it’s abstract nature relies on the attention of the audience; quick paced scenes and ever-changing roles (there are only ten members of the cast, who all play intertwining character roles). The play itself uses laptops and the light screens for most of their scenes as well as multimedia projectors in the background, voice overs and the use of laptop projections (such as Netflix and Facebook) which I found particularly genius – this was one of my favorite points in the play.

Love and Information connected with this weeks reading with the ideas of advertising – not only there was marketing before the production but also during the production – the use of breaking the fourth wall (ie: the characters introducing themselves to the audience and interacting with the audience), the use of technology within a play about the breakdown of characters due to technology and failed relationships (eg: commercial exploitation, zoning, and the inability to ‘unplug’ which leads to the breakdown of friendships and relationships) thus, this fragmented awareness is what the production is based upon – which is why I thought it would be interesting to write about for this week’s initiative post.