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Multimedia Performance Studio
presents
a live movie
Cyburbia Productions'
TIME TRAVELER ZERO ZERO
A Story of John TitorApril 7-10, 2004
8pm, Wednesday-SaturdayHarris Theatre
Center for the Arts
George Mason University
Fairfax VAwritten and directed by
Kirby Malonemusic composed by
Amelia Winger-Bearskin
and Sean Lovelacemultimedia and set design
Gail Scott Whitelighting design
Rob Henckencostume design
Paul K. Stolensound design
Bryan Burketactors, singers
and musicians
Howard Brown-Santos
Bryan Burket
Viraj DeSilva
Craig Garrett
Sean Lovelace
Joshua McCarthy
Matt McGarraghy
Brianna Moran
James Murphy
Chris Parsons
Maria Rio
Prince Rozario
Mike Solo
Jeff Wall
Kelly Wilson
Amelia Winger-Bearskin
Tristan Winger-BearskinWith multiple video projections, a cast of eight singer-actors, and an eight-piece band, TimeTravelerZeroZeropresents an apocalyptic critique of consumer culture, and a chilling vision of a near-future dystopia brought about by a growing police state. A team of more than twenty multimedia artists created state-of-the-art animations and video montages for the innovative scenography which depicts time travel and the worlds of 1975, 2000, 2015 and 2036, in this tale of John Titor, a mysterious figure who posted voluminously on the Internet for six months from late 2000 to early 2001. Was he a time traveler from thirty years in the future, or a hoax? Was he a crackpot or a prophet? Was he science fiction or living proof of the latest theories of quantum physics? With a score that features original songs and soundscapes, and also draws on a dialectical blend of industrial music, trip-hop, rap, country, opera and Bengali singing, Time Traveler Zero Zero is part rock opera, part hybrid cinematic/theatrical performance, designed to provoke thought, and provide listening and viewing pleasure, for young adult audiences of all ages.
RESERVATIONS AND INFORMATION:
(703) 993-8865 / kmalone@gmu.eduFROM THE PROLOGUE
For five months, from November 2000 to March 2001, someone appeared on the Internet and began writing postings as TimeTraveler_zero. He identified himself as John Titor, and he said he was a temporal displacement driver, in the service of Temporal Recon, from the year 2036.
He traveled first back to 1975 to retrieve a particular IBM model portable computer, the 5100, which will be needed by his society to retrofit computers when UNIX code fails in 2038. John Titor acquired the 5100 from his grandfather, an IBM engineer in Rochester, Minnesota. He then time-traveled from 1975 to the year 2000, where he visited his parents (and his three-year-old self) in Florida, wrote voluminous Internet postings, and exchanged views with many other citizens of the ’Net. John Titor’s postings ceased in March 2001, when he said he would return to his own time. He has not been heard from, on what he called our worldline, since.
It doesn’t matter whether John Titor was real, or his story true. His tale boggles the mind, whether he was whom he said he was, or an astoundingly resourceful trickster. He provided schematics, diagrams, photographs, and documents from his service in a TemporalRecon time travel unit in 2036; these visual aids can be laughed at or marveled at (or both). He presented a credible theory and description of time travel, both how it works, and how he does it.
He clearly depicts the prevailing thinking, from Stephen Hawking to Philip K. Dick, on alternate worldlines and the mutability of time. But it’s not the sense of a science fiction film come to life that is so intriguing about John Titor, it is what he had to say about the world of 2000, predictions he made, ranging from epidemic mad cow disease to Chinese space flight to the creation of black holes in the CERN particle accelerator, which have come to pass (or are, or may be, about to).
Most chillingly, what he describes as the history of his world, questionably our future, from 2004 on, unfolds with a civil war in the United States, in response to the installment of a police state, after increasing authoritarian violations of the Constitution and the Bill of Rights, leading the country, and most of the rest of the world, ultimately to the living nightmare of a thermonuclear World War III in 2015, a time he calls "Hell’s Kitchen."
John Titor told of how his world then began to piece itself back together where it could, and of the radical transformation society underwent in the process. For John Titor our world is the history which led to his world, its destruction, and its painful rebirth.
But he also stresses that time and history are not fixed or pre-determined, and that anyone can change their direction(s). While he was "here" in 2000 and 2001, he became what you might call a "cyburbian legend," and he gave anyone who read, listened to, or corresponded with him a different, somewhat alien or outsider view of where our world is now, and where and how it might go. So tonight, in a time of mad, imperial ambitions, here is our version of the story of John Titor.
stage managers
Liz Welke
Kira Hoffmannproduction manager
Dan Hobsonaudio producer
Chris Andrews dramaturgs
Tom Dyman
David Gouldsmith
Rebecca Prater
Mike Solomad science advisers
Alexei Samsonovich
Karl Simanonokanimators and
multimedia artists
Tate Siev Srey
Noah Melnick
Mark Alyea-Cheu
Chris Andrews
Howard Brown-Santos
Sal Castaneda
Scott Cunningham
Ahmet Dillice
Tom Dyman
Carlos Foxworthy
Jen Haefeli
Meredith Harris
Tim Ingle
Pat Kelly
Rebecca Kimmel
Jason Kott
Hye-kyung Emily Lee
Meredith Lydon
Brenden Moran
James Murphy
Ricardo Real
Prince Rozario
Mike Solo
Shawn Taylor
and
Gail Scott Whiteproduction assistants
Ben Ashworth
Jill Buxrud
Kathy Kacharies
Melissa Kurabatchew
Beth Logan
Adriana Lubenova
Susan Serafin
Noah Smith
Charlene Winger-BearskinFOR MORE INFO:
www.avt.gmu.edu/mps website/html/MPS.htm
Cyburbia Productions is a professional multimedia performance company founded in 1999 by Kirby Malone and Gail Scott White, and located on the outskirts of the DC beltway, a place that is plugged-in, on-camera, and data-transferred. Cyburbia’s focus is the collaborative creation of "live movies", syntheses of cinema, theater and music, geared particularly to today's multi-sensory young adult audience. The company’s work employs digital projection and sound technologies, and filmic narrative techniques (such as flashback, lip-synch and slow motion), to construct moving stage pictures and sonic theater, in which an ensemble of live actors, singers and musicians interact with animated performers, and emerge from or vanish into projected environments, settings and dreamscapes.
This work is based on the premise that audiences desire live theater that responds to the mile-wide, inch-deep faux-realities of life on a media-saturated planet. The artists who make this work employ new technologies, turning them in on themselves, to cast light on the way they shape and re-configure our world. Cyburbia's artists refrain from worshipping at the altar of technology, although they spend many hours faithfully staring at illuminated screens and hovering over their keyboards like praying mantises.
Cyburbia creates original productions, often drawing on historical or science fiction sources; innovative stagings of opera and new music theater; multimedia scenography for theater, dance and performance art; and indoor and outdoor projection installations. Cyburbia’s artists work in the Multimedia Performance Studio, where they experiment with new and traditional stage technologies, and develop imaginative approaches to the integration of these technologies with the live action and music of theater. In order to accomplish this symbiosis, the company operates simultaneously as a performance ensemble, a film and animation production house, a digital garage band and a stagecraft laboratory, all geared toward producing dynamic multimedia performance spectacles.
Cyburbia draws on Malone and White’s previous collaborations, including multimedia designs for Smallbeer Theater’s Shamanism in New Jersey,and Theater of the First Amendment’s Doctor Faustus.They have created multimedia designs for Jose Rivera's Marisol, Encompass New Opera Theatre's productions of Hans Werner Henze's The End of a World and John Harbison's A Full Moon in March, and the Virginia Opera; the outdoor projection installation SPLIT: Hive Mind; and the original production Silence & Darkness, a live movie for the cell phone age, excerpts of which have received two work-in-progress studio productions, and which will premiere in its fully-staged, full-length form in a three-week run in the Center for the Arts' Harris Theatre in September 2004.
Multimedia Performance Studio (MPS) is a research and professional producing/ presenting unit of the Department of Art and Visual Technology (AVT), College of Visual and Performing Arts, George Mason University. MPS was founded by Kirby Malone and Gail Scott White, with the guidance and support of AVT Chair, Scott M. Martin, as a laboratory for new technologies in the performing arts, and currently maintains an evolving ensemble of actors, singers, musicians, designers, writers, directors, stage and production managers, multimedia artists and animators, sculptors, inventors, dramaturgs, historians, mad scientists, technicians and engineers.
MPS productions include: Naked Revolution, an opera collaboration with artists Komar & Melamid, composer Dave Soldier, librettist Maita di Niscemi and conductor Sybille Werner; the original performances Auto-bodies, Technocracy and Flesh-bot; and multimedia designs for choreographers Jane Franklin and Elizabeth Price, and a production in celebration of Langston Hughes.
MPS is committed to creating innovative, thought-provoking productions which bring together collaborative teams of guest artists, resident faculty artists and student artists, in the belief that it is just such a combination of talent, energy and commitment that led to many of the ground-breaking developments in music theater and performance in the 20th Century, in centers of experiment such as the Bauhaus and Black Mountain College.
The Multimedia Performance Studio is in its fifth year at Mason, supported in part by the National Endowment for the Arts in the form of a $125,000 grant for the "New Stage Technology Project." For this project, MPS engages in intensive research into the development, harnessing and synchronization of new technologies for the stage, and their integration with live actors, singers and musicians.
Kirby Malone
Gallery and Multimedia Performance Studio Director Assistant Professor of InterArts
Department of Art and Visual Technology College of Visual and Performing ArtsMailing Address:
MSN 1C3/C200 College Hall
George Mason University
4400 University Drive
Fairfax VA 22030(703) 993-8865 (work and voice mail)
(703) 222-5184 (home, no machine)
kmalone@gmu.eduGallery:
www.gmu.edu/gallery
.
