Remote Viewer

with Tyler Coburn and Jenny Seastone

2017  ·  live performance

Remote Viewer is a series of parafictional workshops written and directed by Tyler Coburn and myself. The project explores opacity and obfuscation, drawing parallels between the CIA's history of psychic spying research and contemporary practices of surveillance and data capture.

In the first two stagings, workshops included nine members of the public, and, unbeknownst to them, three professional actors, who subtly steered the other participants in predetermined directions. Each workshop culminated in a scene of exaggerated conflict between two actors, with one storming out in a theatrical huff. The workshop then ended abruptly, leaving the obviously scripted exchange unexplained. Participants left with a sense of disorientation as to which aspects of the workshop had been "real" in the first place, evoking broader questions of veracity, assumptions, and subterfuge.

In a conceptual bait-and-switch, the third staging in 2023 was performed by Jenny Seastone as a "last-minute stand-in."

Stagings:

2023 - Body Double (curated by Nicole Kaack) at Dunes, Portland, ME

2018 - Triangle Arts, Brooklyn NY

2017 - TECHNE, Kunstlerhaus Stuttgart and Theatre Rampe, Stuttgart, Germany

Press:

Dan Fox, Remote Viewing: Resurrecting the CIA’s Art of Psychic Travel, Frieze (2018)

Hilary Irons, Covert Operations: Tyler Coburn and Ian Hatcher’s Remote Viewer Explores CIA Seances, Boston Art Review (2023)

In conversation with Tyler Coburn, Fatima Hellberg, and Johanna Markert about Remote Viewer

Art Talk about Remote Viewer at UC Berkeley