… Or Press Escape

‘Finally, the PC is used as a concrete story-telling
medium!’ - Moose (online theatre-magazine)

Somewhere in a large West European city. Late at night a
women is sitting behind her computer. On the (enlarged) screen in front of her,
the audience reads her interior monologue and digital dialogue. We deduct that
she’s a stranger in town. She hears a strange noise coming from the floor above
her. Is there an intruder in the building? Via e-mail she tries to establish
contact with her neighbour. She writes and rewrites, edits, deletes, and
spell-checks in a language that is not her own. Her attention is constantly
being divided and diverted by new messages dropping into her mailbox,
Web-surfing, entering chat-rooms, opening sometimes risky files, playing movies
and sound clips… We hear a familiar soundscape: the buzz of the
computer-ventilator, system noises, the (often emotionally revealing) way the
keyboard is being struck… From all these dispersed elements a certain character
gradually emerges, a person with a history and a story.
…Or Press Escape
is mesmerising and intelligent ‘New Media’ in its purest form, way beyond the
hype. Instead of trying to dazzle its audience with spectacular, high-tech,
brain-dead software fantasies, Kaldor points in the opposite direction: towards
the rich and diverse complexity contained in the activities and relationships
of the person behind the computer.
‘The scene in which the computer informs its user that there is insufficient
memory space and that files must be deleted is breathtaking. Look at me, the
meddlesome computer seems to say, but as the woman clicks away all her open
programs and files, she actually ends up looking at herself’ — Vrij Nederland
Press Enter!
 
concept & performance: Edit Kaldor; made by: E. Kaldor, Nicola Unger, Zsolt
Mesterhazy, Catherine Henegan; software: Marc Boon; produced by: Theater
Gasthuis (Amsterdam); in co-production with: Kunstlerhaus Mousonturn
(Frankfurt).

in cooperation with: Slovenska kinoteka