My Voice in Your Head' by Edward Dorrian and Sally Morfill, with Alex Schady, 07|07|02 – 20|09|02

'Like the pictures in a film, epic theatre moves in spurts. Its basic form is that of the shock with which the single, well-defined situations of the play collide. The songs, the captions, the lifeless conventions set off one situation after another. This brings about intervals which, if anything, impair the illusion of the audience and paralyze its readiness for empathy. These intervals are reserved for the spectators' critical reaction – to the actions of the players and to the way in which they are presented. As to the manner of presentation, the actor's task in the epic theatre is to demonstrate through his acting that he is cool and relaxed. He too has hardly any use for empathy. For this kind of acting the 'player' of the dramatic theatre is not always fully prepared. Perhaps the most open-minded approach to epic theatre is to think of it in terms of 'putting on a show'.
Walter Benjamin, What Is Epic Theatre?

My Voice in Your Head made simple use of the architecture of a browser window. The user navigated through a series of linked pages displaying a frame by frame video sequence. This sequence showed an actor hearing and subsequently reciting the lines of a story. Each web page contained a single video frame and each page title displayed a full sentence from the same story. Reviewing the full sequence of page titles via a browser’s History function made apparent the text of a whole episode.

This work was the second collaboration between Edward Dorrian and Sally Morfill following Valse, a video piece shown earlier in 2002 as part of Silence and Darkness at Outline, Amsterdam.

For more information read the My Voice in Your Head press release.