"a human being goes through all experiences of varying intensity, but these processes do not differ in essence from other process that deploy forces in magnetic fields, acoustic waves or heat waves. Human experience, with all its gradations of temperature, spasms of pain and orgasms, is of essentially the same nature as other physical processes, difficult to represent in language, and only measurable by gradations of the sort indicated by thermometers and barometers, an 'exposition' of anger, a 'wave' of shame, a 'flood' of tears, a 'stream' of pleasure.1"
"Theatre was no longer conceived as an institution where presentation and interpretation were governed and produced by a series of signs coded and transmitted in a fixed manner... 1"
Important thought here about physicality or energy of the performer. It can be used to engage the audience in more than one way. Though Entos tries to mimic one performer's relation to technology with the audience's relation to their controller, the performance also needs to rely on communication or energy transmission from performer to audience. Audience can't be allowed to act a spectator but needs direct emotional attachment to the performers. Thus to keep channelling this affect the hero of the narrative is left ambiguous. The audience must decide who is the hero? Will the character fall into a tragedy or comedy?
"We all know, do we not, that this is a major difference between the plots of Greek tragedies and those of most modern dramas: in Greek tragedy the audience knew from the start what was going to happen by the end. And it presumably follows from that that the key events of the plot were fixed in advance and unalterable... 2"
This unalterable narrative seems very machinelike, like it was made to serve it's purpose. When developing Entos, everyone on the team wanted to explore Human to Technology relationship. One of the most common arguments about the topic was the idea that humans lose their identity to technology, and thus the determinant factor for the human was a technological one. There are many more arguments to the relationship, but we wanted to focus on identity. Entos was developed with a twist, situations must work in a certain reverse, there must not be a singular ending, but at the same time necessary to display technology or to give it voice within an argument that is wholly biased towards humans.
"Fundamentally, a human person is a desiring being, a cluster of psychic-energetic processes that produce desire, a desire that continuously produces products, these being biological (like hormones), neurological (like emotions) and subjective reflections (like: 'I feel this?'). Hence the idea of equating human productivity with machines: desire functions as a machine and all partial machines that constitute the human person are interconnected and can at any moment change their interaction.1"
This is a interesting field to explore, since it allows us to compare humans to technology. This is one reason why there is a human playing a 'Technology'; machine character. It allows the use of 'desire' as a device to not only introduce attraction for human to technology but also explores the idea of 'desire' and whether it is human feeling once technology were to take over human identity. In which case what is still keeping the human attached to technology?
1. Hall, E., & Harrop, S. (2010). Does a Deleuzean Philosophy of Radical Physicality Lead to the 'Death of Tragedy'? Some Thoughts on the Dismissal of the Climactic Orientation of Greek Tragedy. Theorising performance: Greek drama, cultural history and critical practice (pp. 123-136). London: Duckworth.
2. Sommerstein, A. H. (2010). 'They all knew how it was going to end': tragedy, myth and the spectator. The tangled ways of Zeus: and other studies in and around Greek tragedy(pp. 203-223). Oxford: Oxford University Press.