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Sarah Grochala talks about the process of creating the digital double app and the ideas that inspired it. The talk was given at the Nam Paik June Art Center in Seoul, South Korea. The talk is in English and translated into Korean.

Saturday 22 November 2014
1pm – 5pm
Anatomy Lecture Theatre, King's College London

Tickets: Free

People often refer to the idea that we are living in 1984, but to what extent is that a valid observation about contemporary society?

In 2013, Headlong collaborated with the Cultural Institute’s at King's on a project to explore the relationship between digital technology and live performance. This partnership resulted in the development of an app, 1984 Digital Double, which explores the nature of contemporary surveillance.

Headlong and the Cultural Institute at King's invite you to join a group of digital experts and innovative artists for a day of platform panels exploring a wide range of questions about digital technology, live performance and surveillance.

Speakers include: Dr Btihaj Ajana (King’s), Dr Claudia Aradau (King’s), Tony Bunyan (Statewatch), Professor Alex Callinicos (King’s), Robert Delamere (Digital Theatre), Jeremy Herrin (Headlong), Robert Icke (Co-adaptor and co-director of 1984), Professor Tim Jordan (Sussex University), Dawn King (Playwright), Duncan Macmillan (Co-adaptor and co-director of 1984), Dr Dan Mcquillan (Goldsmiths College), Tassos Stevens (Coney), Simon Vans-Colier, Oliver Cole and Spiros Andreou (TOR Project).

The Nether Realm is a living virtual world inspired by Jennifer Haley’s new play, The Nether. The artwork explores the ways in which virtual environments can be the product of our activities in real life and considers the idea that the moral character of these online public spaces is ultimately dependent on how we create and interact with them.

The realm is linked in real time to the Twitter hashtag #TheNether. Every time the hashtag is used on Twitter, new life is breathed into the world. When the hashtag is not in use the world slowly starts to decay.

It’s up to you how beautiful or how dark the world becomes.

On 6 June 2013, journalists from the Guardian and Washington Post reported that the US National Security Agency (NSA) was undertaking a portfolio of clandestine mass surveillance programs on a scale reminiscent of George Orwell’s dystopian society of 1984. Their initiatives supposedly ranged from bulk collection of email and telephone records to infiltrating the data infrastructures of every leading internet company and service provider. These activities were not targeted at specific individuals or groups, but rather focused on compiling personal data from millions of unsuspecting citizens indiscriminately and without jurisdiction or oversight.

PRISM is a digital installation by artist Michael Takeo Magruder reflecting on these revelations and the person who brought this information to the public's attention, Edward Snowden. The project has been produced in collaboration with Headlong and the Cultural Institute at King's College London.

Monday 15 – Saturday 29 March 2014
10am-6pm
Entrance Hall, King's College London, Strand Campus
Free Entrance

Monday 17 – Saturday 29 March 2014
10am-6pm
Entrance Hall, King's College London, Strand Campus
Free Entrance

Saturday 15 February 2014
9.30am-5.15pm
Almeida Theatre

Robert Icke and Duncan Macmillan’s radical new adaptation of 1984 explores how Orwell’s novel is as applicable to the here and now as it ever was.

Join the creators of 1984 and a panel of theatre experts to explore how the process of creating a truly successful adaptation is often a very different thing from delivering the version people expect.

In his original incarnation, Patrick Bateman is (literally) deadly dull.

His life is hollow, defined by designer clothes, exclusive restaurants and elaborate personal grooming routines – all described in excruciatingly banal detail. Regarded by his own attorney as a “brown-nosed goody-goody,” Bateman strives so hard to fit in with his elitist Wall Street culture that he becomes totally indistinguishable from his arrogant yuppie peers.

What should gain him a distinctive identity are his horrifically sadistic murderous activities. Yet ultimately, even these “mean nothing,” for, when Bateman confesses, nobody believes that he could even “pick up a call-girl, let alone chop her up.’” Indeed, the only place Bateman is cool and charismatic is in his own psychotic head, from which, in the first-person narration of Bret Easton Elllis’ novel, there is no exit.

An electronic stock market board. Photo: Katina Tuliao.

What have the Big Bang, Clause IV and stagflation got to do with capitalism?

Frank Wedekind wasn’t really a playwright. Of course that makes no sense, since he wrote a whole bunch of plays, but it does have a meaning and it is possibly helpful to remember when staging Spring Awakening.

An oil well. Photo: John Hill.

What have tea, oil and buttonwood trees got to do with capitalism?

A 16th Century Galleon. Artist: Pearson Scott Foresman

What have tulips, puritans and galleons got to do with capitalism?