FAUST SHOP: a mixed reality installation

Description

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MEPHISTOPHELES.

Just fancy that! One does depend / On one’s own creatures, in the end.

Johann Wolfgang Goethe’s Faust, translated by David Luke.

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The FAUST SHOP is a strange and fascinating place, an augmented installation that has appeared in an unassuming shopping centre and invites the passer by inside to explore the Faustian pacts we make in our daily engagement with technology. Stepping into this pop-up shop, you will find stories that straddle the divide between the virtual and the real with characters appearing onscreen as well as in the flesh through motion capture and digital art. The installation also showcases digital objects submitted in response to a public call for donations.

Here, you will be offered the opportunity to re-claim your digital soul, the information that we trail behind us as we make our way through the online world. This digital twin, produced by AI-driven technology, draws on the sum of our connections, mouse and eye movements, steps, interests, search terms, beliefs, and clicks on the ‘I agree’ button. How do we feel about this ghostly self? What would we do to rescue it? How happy are we to let it linger on forever in a place like this?

Research-based and combining the talents of numerous academics, performers, artists and more, FAUST SHOP asks you to join its artistic community to consider the impacts of technology. It offers us the world – but what does it want in return?

The FAUST SHOP installation is a more relaxed accompaniment to the performance piece ‘New Lands’ which is also taking part inside the Faust Shop. This mixed reality exhibition can be explored in your own time, and is presented as part of a research project on Re-staging public spaces, led by Research Fellow Dr Annja Neumann at Cambridge Digital Humanities. It is supported by Cambridge Digital Humanities, Space Popular, a research driven architecture, design, and media studio, Sook Space, and the School of Creative Industries at Anglia Ruskin University.

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Team

External partners and sponsors:

Sook Space, Adaptive Retail Space
Cambridge School of Creative Industries, Anglia Ruskin University
Space Popular, Architecture, Design and Media Studio

Creative team:

Dr Annja Neumann: Co-director and co-writer
Alexander Mentzel, Co-director and co-writer
Dr Kirk Woolford, Artistic technical director
Rebekah King, Artistic Producer and Research Assistant
Dr Eva Aymamí Reñé, Movement director and dancer

Cast:  

Sylvia Keck, Poet
Olivia Railton, Director
Michelle Zhang, Homunculus
Oscar Hudson, Intellectual
Johanna Freistedt, Wagner
Linseigh Green, Faust I
Maddy Power, Mephisto I/Comic
Imogen Gray, Mephistopheles II
Lingquan Kong, Technologist/Shop Assistant II
TBC, Wealthy Collector
Alex Mentzel, Shop Assistant/Faust II

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