< /cl!ck > is an interactive, multimedia installation that demonstrates the ways in which culture, personality, and subconscious bias are revealed by our online behavior. The show features five distinct caricatures — familiar to us from our time on Instagram, Tinder, Twitter, and Facebook — who interact with each other. The electronic score is produced and composed by Myles Avery, and browser-based visualizations of their behavior are coded in collaboration with Pierre DePaz.

The space is set up with two large, semi translucent screens, onto which are projected two browsers; the effect is something like being caught inside a laptop. The performers are placed intentionally on-screen or off screen throughout the piece. Their interactions with the screens and with each other include a parodied mash-up of the gestures we use to interact with our devices, contemporary dance forms, and performative actions. Our movement references include steps from A Chorus Line, Béyonce videos, emojis, professional football players, the Rockettes, and Instagram Yoga stars. They make fun of themselves and their peers with enthusiasm, cushioned by their digital environment and a seeming lack of consequence.

However, there are consequences, and they are real, and soon the work spirals into an abstractly prismatic depiction of the ways in which internet culture can be intensely harmful. At first our crushing loneliness and desperate need for attention is funny. However, as it gets more personal and more violent, the gleeful ways in which we relate to this behavior become disturbing. The world we are witnessing is cruel, as well as inescapably gendered and whitewashed. Even amidst all of the visual stimuli, the world of the performers remains limited.

<cl!ck> is contemporary dance run through a distortion pedal, spun through hundreds of lines of code, filtered through Facebook’s algorithm, and seen through the lens of a candid take on 21st Century reality. By anthropomorphizing our digital experience, < /cl!ck > turns screen-based activity into a performative demonstration of our digital behavior. It reveals the implications of our collective social preferences and subconscious daily activity in the digital sphere, while simultaneously forcing us to question their profound impact upon ourselves as individuals.