James Ferraro presents: Plague

About

The world premiere of James Ferraro’s new stage performance "Plague" at transmediale 2018, presented in cooperation with CTM Festival, sees an undead Steve Jobs crawling around in a purgatorial wasteland of physical and digital sewage.  Partly disgusted, partly enthralled by the world he has so significantly contributed to, Jobs finds himself only a pawn in a much bigger scheme of history: he is the surrogate of a deranged AI, a data mongrel comprised of all our networked activity. This AI is the main actor in this commissioned performance by musician and composer James Ferraro—in collaboration with visual artist Nate Boyce, the choir Phønix16, and the actor Christoph Schüchner, Ferraro has created a stage-based audiovisual spectacle, an infernal vision of our socially networked post-digital times. Fusing modern classical composition with post-digital aesthetics, the world of "Plague" hints at the coming automation of human destructiveness.
"Plague is presented in co-operation with CTM Festival and is commissioned by transmediale and Abandon Normal Devices as part of the New Networked Normal with the support of the Creative Europe program of the European Union.