“Chroniques d’une exploratrice” by Alice Gozlan and Zacharie Lorent. “@RabbitHowl: Go see Osaka, there’s a box full of straw”. Photo Courtesy L’Etoile du nord © Alice Gozlan
Until Alice Gozlan and Zacharie Lorent’s theater performance Chroniques d’une exploratrice (“An Explorer’s Chronicle”), I’d never seen Web experience on stage, theatricalized. I don’t mean I hadn't read depictions of a fantasy “cyber-world” such as William Gibson’s Neuromancer or seen such fantastic allegories of real life as the Wachowski bros. film The Matrix made into stage plays. I mean I hadn't seen a stage portrayal of actual human Web experience: sitting typing on a keyboard, scrolling, watching video and hearing audio clips, making acquaintance via pseudonymous written-language chat boxes, emoting, usually alone, in a personal space.
More than any other form of art, except pure dance, of course, theater performance of a thing can help a body understand it as an actual phenomenon. Think of all the plays based on conversations – think the B-52 crew in Dr. Strangelove. With the United States soon to be run by Web trolls, cranks and personas, it’s about time somebody did.
Alice Gozlan and Zacharie Lorent build the plot of Chroniques d’une exploratrice around Alice Gozlan’s discovery of the Web’s thriving white-supremacist, or what I think of as a “Nazi”, world. That is harrowing and entertaining but I am inclined to pretty much ignore it here in order to talk about its theatrical framework.
As a framework, Chroniques is as savvy and pertinent as could be. Alice Gozlan and Zacharie Lorent create a place and atmosphere appropriate to the physical and psychic action involved in Web exploration that Alice Gozlan can then meaningfully perform.
A conversation play needs a table and a hidden subject, a war play, a commander and belabored guesswork, a murder play, a weapon and secret motive. A Web play needs a screen (with keyboard or access-equivalent) a thirst to know.
The set of Chroniques has three different screens, one large screen set center and two smaller ones set back, stage right, to create a “screen environment” where Gozlan can watch others and herself, and be watched, by herself and others. With the “red-pill-blue-pill” scene from The Matrix running on one, the two smaller screens visually betray a larger Web reality or context.
The screen environment brings out the particularity that of Web interface requires a systematic self-othering of the person-exploring it. The person who decides to sit at the keyboard is the person who observes and authorizes but does not directly operate the Web persona (handle, pseudo or identifier), the authorized Other, as it were, that does on-screen/on-line interaction.
How the person and the Othered Web persona are tethered seems to me the heart of any effective portrayal of Web experience.
To theatricalize the Othering link of person and Web persona, Gozlan and Lorent use the three available theatrical spaces: stage-line, set and seats. Performer Alice Gozlan first sits on the edge of the stage as informant, then takes a seat in the audience as observer, then enters the set space as both Web Explorer persona and stage performer of the Web Experience. A telephone/voice relationship with a self-involved partner whose life seems to move parallel to rather than with her own highlights the Web Explorer Alice Gozlan’s alone-ness in an environment that is otherwise home.
The whole effect of this is to show an Alice Gozlan person and a Web Explorer persona living as a unit in an ordinary living space, a “home” that is also a sort of Wonderland, full of unsettling encounters, relations and adventures. This sense of home certainly undercuts the traditional image of safety and comfort; the place of “outside” is also the place of “inside”; the intruder is within the home and outside it.
Chroniques depicts a Web that is only as dark as its explorer, or maybe as dark as their itch of curiosity, wants it to be; if snuff films or Russian state propaganda are slithering into an Explorer’s YouTube feed, the Web Explorer has in some way brought them on. Alice Gozlan’s Web Explorer relates how she came to explore the internet outside her established yoga, cooking, and how-to algorithms – by trying a little, pressing against the rabbit hole of her ordinary algorithmic world.
“Chroniques d’une exploratrice” by Alice Gozlan and Zacharie Lorent. Photo Courtesy L’Etoile du nord © Alice Gozlan
This is important verisimilitude: the tether that links the person and persona is thick and also guilt-inspiring.
Alice Gozlan’s Web Explorer persona finally tumbles into the parallel rabbit-hole of misogynists and Nazis through a single link. The links’ logics send her much further along, working pretty much in the same way that my curiosity about the UFO hearings has generated videos claiming that the human reptiles I all too often run into are, in fact, reptile-like alien invaders masquerading as human beings.
As an “othered self” and operating on what is perceived as “the other side of the screen”, the Alice Gozlan’s Web Explorer persona has a “web object” to structure a psyche appropriate to the conditions of its environment – analogous to, if not surely an, “emotional object”. Alice Gozlan’s Web Explorer persona finds her object in un-localized, livesurveillance-camera image of a woman alone on a mattress on a floor.
The woman on the mattress has a bruise on her arm.
In real life and Web experience, an object, even an emotional object, is seen: there is some association between seeing it and the emotions raised by the sight. In a rainstorm, for instance, from my kitchen window, a half mile of so up the hillside, I see a mother neighbor smoking on her terrace. Her predicament moves me just as the predicament of the solitary woman on the mattress moves Alice Gozlan.
Both objects are seen, both are out of reach, but only Alice Gozlan’s woman on the mattress is unreachable, forcing the sort of dissociation of emotion and experience that characterizes a range of common psychic disorders.
Alice Gozlan’s Web persona doesn’t just leave its Alice Gozlan person dissociated. It adumbrates helplessness: it can’t communicate with its emotional object, nor locate it, nor come to its aid, nor even hope to come to its aid, nor, since she controls neither the access machinery nor the algorithms that shape her journey, even find it, or find it again. Completing this awful tableau of dissociation and helplessness inflicted on the person through the Web persona is the uncertainty surrounding the object itself. I know as best as a body here-below can know it, that the smoking mother through my window exists – if I felt any uncertainty, I would take it as a sign that I should adjust my anti-psychotic medicine. Not so for the woman on the mattress. The persona delivers an image of an object that may or may not be fake. If image-object is fake, the feelings it arouses in Alice Gozlan, as deeply felt as they may be, are, insofar as the image may be a manipulation, fake, too.
And, finally, all the while, there is a possibility that the Web object is a real woman and that the person Alice Gozlan is a nasty voyeur, and a nasty fascinated voyeur, too. It’s her responsibility: who forced Alice Gozlan to go Nazi-hunting?
The dramatic thread of Chroniques d’une exploratrice mixes the Web Exploration into the world. In its denouement, Real and Web worlds touch as Alice Gozlan, first through betrayal, when she is doxed, and then when other Web personas take real form in her physical world. As I watched the plot roll out, I couldn’t help but make out a structure that parallels with those incomprehensible Gnostic tracts I ploughed through so long ago for my thesis … Indeed, I just call Alice Gozlan’s Web Explorer persona, “Seeker Alice” and say that her goal is getting knowledge of mysteries (otherwise closed to her) rather than “looking into white supremacy-nazis”. I then think of the “chapters” that mark the dramatic timeline are “rungs” on the ladder to enlightenment, I could very well be reading Hermes Trismegistus.
“Chroniques d’une exploratrice” by Alice Gozlan and Zacharie Lorent. Photo Courtesy L’Etoile du nord © Alice Gozlan
Of course, the “red-pill, blue-pill, ignorance-or-knowledge” narrative, as well as the routine of psychic dissociation certainly lend themselves to the notion that Web exploration is experienced as a “spiritual journey”. But what convinces me of a connection to mystic/spirit cult tradition is the way Web personas relate to one another, especially as “guide-and-seeker”, a relationship often found in spiritual journey narratives other than Gnostic ones.
There has grown up on the Web just such a culture of semi-conflictual relationships between “seekers”, “adepts”, “guides” and “masters”. Guides, adepts and masters are often very ambiguous personas, with obscure motives and little patience for seekers and adepts and who possess “special” knowledge of one sort or another – I’m thinking here of Robert Crumb’s Mr. Natural character. In the real world we have an example of Donald Trump pronouncing, very much in the rhetorical vein of @RabbitHowl, from his very own platform.
I evoked Gnosticism. With oracular language, “Q”, the cryptic, apocalyptic Web persona, said to be an anonymous state “insider”, guides many a “queer thinker” across the wide world to broader truths about what is really going on. The “Q” handle references a theoretical source – “true” – gospel [Word of God]”. Web Explorer Alice Gozlan’s guide, “@RabbitHowl”, who attaches himself to her because of her curiosity (and shows her, among other things, the woman-Web object on the mattress) also doxes her, undoing her Web Explorer persona and returning her to her reality as a solitary woman at home. Her guide thus makes her vulnerable in reality to all the Nazi creepiness she’s become acquainted with on the Web.
Alice Gozlan’s Web Explorer persona also has an equally ambiguous “protector” with the handle/persona “LaCréature”. This noun has the same semantic field as the English cognate and, I think, off the top of my head, probably references Kreacher, in the very popular Harry Potter series, the conflicted house elf left to Harry Potter by the divided House of Black. LaCréature is backed up by a Web real world gang called “Animals of the Night”: totems, ids, sprites.
As from all voyages, Alice Gozlan, the person and performer, returns transformed. As Chroniques has it, the transformation involves both recognition of the person’s real vulnerability and solitariness and the existence of a – formerly – unacknowledged and ugly world.
Be wary, friends, theatrical form often mirrors real-world content.
Good job, Alice Gozlan, for a quality performance and with co-creator Zacharie Lorent, a really intelligent and original staging.
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I saw “Chroniques d’une exploratrice” created by Alice Gozlan and Zacharie Lorent, performance by Alice Gozlan, at L’Etoile du nord on 7 November 2024, with sound by Nicolas Hadot, lighting installation and video with Simon Anquetil and Clément Chebli, and costumes and set design by Marjolaine Mansot.