In All Watched Over by Machines of Loving Grace, Ezra Veldhuis and Bosse Provoost address the the­me of free­dom and unfree­dom in rela­ti­on to tech­no­lo­gy, by sta­ging Richard Brautigan’s 1967 poem of the same name.

Brautigan’s poem depicts a cyber­ne­tic gar­den of Eden, an idyll in which machi­nes will free us from work. Anno 2022, we may read this poem very dif­fe­rent­ly than Brautigan inten­ded at the time. When we think of tech­no­lo­gy in rela­ti­on to free­dom, Big Tech and sur­veil­lan­ce tech­no­lo­gy domi­na­te our ima­gi­na­ti­on. We seem to be at the ser­vi­ce of tech­no­lo­gy, rather than tech­no­lo­gy pro­vi­ding us with essen­ti­al free­dom. Does that mean Brautigan’s dream is dead? Are we alrea­dy living in a total­ly per­ver­ted rea­li­za­ti­on of it? Or does the free­dom pro­mi­sed in his dream still con­tain poten­ti­al? This is what Veldhuis and Provoost will explo­re in their new cre­a­ti­on, by sta­ging a ​“bio-tech­ni­cal envi­ron­ment”: a con­stel­la­ti­on of peo­p­le (three performers,the audien­ce), mate­ri­als and devi­ces in a cli­ma­te of light and sound. Within that envi­ron­ment, accom­pa­nied by an eclec­tic musi­cal palet­te, they depict rela­ti­ons­hips of inter­de­pen­d­en­cy, both sym­bi­o­tic and con­flic­tu­al, bet­ween the human and non-human actors.