The world is a huge commotion and its image is thrown together using everything available: mountains, beaches, romantic palm trees, futuristic skyscrapers, numerical codes and spacey projections. Jan Brokof & Co. have provided a punchy stage design for Andcompany & Co. in the Hebbel Theatre (HAU1): it’s is at once stark and all flowing into one, inside and outside, yesterday and today.

It’s the best vehicle possible for the intellectual journey that Alexander Karschnia, Nicola Nord and Sascha Sulimma present us with on this evening in the once futuristic country of Chile, which wanted to embark on a digitally-managed socialism at the beginning of the 1970s. It wanted to – but the rebels put an early end to that dream. So why are the three performers now crawling once more through this reproduction of the experiment?

Ideologies Under the Magnifying Glass

They are travelling on commission from the HAU theatre, which is taking a closer look at the increasing data collection and networking ideology of our age in its week-long festival, ‘Spy on me’ die. A long-overdue project which – leaving aside the absolutely trivial ‘Call a Spy Show’ by the activist Peng!Collective – led to the creation of two thoughtful and dense performances.

It isn’t easy to successfully criticise the blessings of the digital world – partly because ‘the Internet’ now enjoys something like a holy life of its own, whose direction is determined by just a few major corporations – Andcompany takes pleasure in referring to this present as ‘Colonial Digital’ and sallies forth, in its production of the same name, to find another type of interconnectedness, or at least another social relevance for the one we have already.

Cybernetic Socialism

They strike gold in the tender early years of the Internet itself, when the boldest visions were not being hatched in California, but rather in Salvador Allende’s Chile, which wanted to ingeniously create a just but efficient national economy with the help of new technologies. In order to achieve this, Allende brought over to Santiago the British cyberneticist Stafford Beer, who was meant to develop a system for exchanging data between the the country’s different economic levels. Now, his model is hanging next to Karschnia in HAU and looks disarmingly small.
It is doubtful whether Beer’s ‘system’ would be successful today, but just the thought of implanting a different meaning into the Internet as it being nothing more than a communication platform circulating within itself, generating astounding riches for a handful of huge corporations, is a winning one. The fact that the most high-performing technology is not nearly being used to its full potential inspires the three social critics to have a raging, fast-paced, unguarded discussion.

In the Arms of the Internet Kraken

Can there even be any control in the huge free space that is the Internet? Is controlling something the same as ruling over it? Is our head the only centre? And what is the point of all these digital communications when the analogue world remains as unchangingly unfair as it ever was? These are good questions, with which our three performers crawl ever deeper into the billowing Internet kraken, and slowly, through their talking, trace out his contours from the inside. ‘I distract therefore I am,’ cries Karschnia at one point in a flash of wit, and thus already comes close to the second, productively complex performance.