In Counter Indications we are investigating scenarios between interrogator/interviewer and participants/interviewees. Upon arriving at the installation, audience members will be processed via a detailed Intake form. This process will convince them that they are involved in a research project and not a piece of "theatre,” and that they are being “profiled.”
The audience is divided into two groups, participants and observers, before entering the multi-room installation. The observers watch, via closed-circuit video, a series of disorienting and increasingly manipulative techniques being used by the virtual actor/interviewer on the live participants, who are seated in specially designed carrels causing them to assume a “stress position” in order to hear/see the virtual narrator, delivered to them via closed-circuit video and processed audio.
The interviewees are shown a series of images, ostensibly taken from a recent news event, which are composite images documenting something that did not happen. The goal is to get the naive interviewees to "remember" this event, or at least agree that it is highly possible it occurred. Scenarios are played out between naïve participants, a pre-arranged “plant,” and the virtual interrogator (video monitor) to challenge the veracity of what is revealed under pressure, under influence of others, and in the disorienting buzz of multi-sensory input (but avoiding any actual abuse of participants, following IRB guidelines).
At the conclusion, observers and participants are subjected to an exit interview to probe their responses, as well as a set of information that reveals and explains the project’s mission, delivered via a password-protected URL.
Everything you saw during the session was a fabrication - there was no roadside explosion in November 2007, nor is there any known spree of murders by anti-immigrant hate groups of undocumented workers.Two of the individuals questioned during your session were plants, complicit in the project, operating with a prepared script. As were several members of the audience.
COUNTER INDICATIONS
Premiere Phoenix April 2008 Space 55
Created and Directed by Jeff McMahon and Jacob Pinholster 2007-2008
Assisted by Mike Matthews, Steve Wilcox
Performed by: Steven Mastroieni, Desiree Rowe, Elizabeth Peterson, Boyd Branch, Keola, Heidi Haru Ernst, Sara Sanabia Baraldi, Michelle Ceballos Michot, Angela Giron, Scott Jacobson, Kristin Koptiuch, Carla Melo, Arthur Sabatini, Seline Szkupinski-Quiroga.
QUOTES:
"He who can lead you to believe an absurdity, can lead you to commit an atrocity."
Voltaire (François-Marie Arouet, 1694- 1778)
"The more you know about someone, the harder it is to hurt them."
Zadie Smith, author of White Teeth and On Beauty (reading at ASU 9/16/06)
Counter Indications investigates how a person can be guided, even coerced, into saying things he/she does not believe, seeing things he/she has not actually seen, and “confessing” when no confession is justified. This understanding arrives through a work of visceral, immersive theatre, placing live art into the center of social discourse. This relates to a central tenet of this exploration: theatre and interrogative practices share a common modality of constructing reality around a central premise.
As a live performance/installation, Counter Indications examines the limits to which one should go in order to extract needed information. We explore how live art might take an audience through an investigative process without letting them distance themselves emotionally and politically. The experience of audiences at performative events today is devoid of stakes - how can we use interaction, distributed media, and alternate reality methods to simultaneously extend a performance beyond space and time, while placing an observer within the context of the event itself?
Building on the revelations regarding Guantánamo Bay, Abu Ghraib and elsewhere, Counter Indications attempts to disarm the audience and suspend post-modern ironic distance. Presenting the piece somewhat outside of the black box of theatre, we hope to arrive at a wider understanding, through a theatrical model, of influence and interrogation. To do that, we have to understand how our current practices of coercion function. Through the creation of a "fake" intervention/exploration, we hope to find material that might make such real-life situations more productive, humane, and less damaging, and that participants come away with a deeper understanding of how current techniques can be misused.
This project hinges on the collaborative mix of skills and sensibilities of the co-creators, both currently teaching in ASU’s School of Theatre and Film
Jeff McMahon has been creating solo and group collaborative projects since 1982, and contributes his conceptualizing, writing, directing, and performing experience.
www.jeffmcmahonprojects.net
Jake Pinholster's extensive and impressive work in media design, seen most recently in New York with the internationally renowned companies Les Freres Corbusier and the David Dorfman Dance Company, often works with the seamless integration of the live and the mediated, putting into practice post-modern theories regarding media presence and persistence.
Counter-Indications emerged from extensive conversations in 2006 between these two artists. Both are dissatisfied with the spatial and perceptual limitations of much current live theatre, and share a desire to make work that goes beyond Aristotelian catharsis to interrogate the position of the audience in relation to the "action." These two artists share a belief that in a University setting it is possible to develop work that might have difficulty being initially produced in the marketplace, yet which shows great promise for eventual presentation outside of this research laboratory.
RESOURCES:
from The Lucifer Effect: Understanding How Good People Turn Evil Philip Zimbardo (Random House NY 2007):
Ten Lessons from the Milgram Studies: Creating Evil Traps for Good People
1. Prearranging some form of contractual obligation, verbal or written, to control the individual's behavior in pseudolegal fashion. (In Milgram's experiment, this was done by publicly agreeing to accept the tasks and procedures.)
2 Giving participants meaningful roles to play ("teacher," "learner") that carry with them previously learned positive values and automatically activate response scripts.
3 Presenting basic rules to be followed that seem to make sense before their actual use but can then be used arbitrarily and impersonally to justify mindless compliance. Also, systems control people by making their rules vague and changing them as necessary but insisting that "rules are rules" and thus must be followed (as the researcher in the lab coat did in Milgram's experiment of or the SPE guard did to force prisoner Clay-416 to eat the sausages.)
4. Altering the semantics of the act, the actor, and the action (from "hurting victims" to "helping the experimenter," punishing the former for the lofty goal of scientific discovery)—replacing unpleasant reality with desirable rhetoric, gilding the frame so that the real picture is disguised. (We can see the same semantic framing at work in advertising, where, for example, bad-tasting mouthwash is framed as good for you because it kills germs and tastes like medicine is supposed to taste.)
5. Creating opportunities for the diffusion of responsibility or abdication of responsibility for negative outcomes; others will be responsible, or the actor won't be held liable. (In Milgram's experiment, the authority figure said, when questioned by any "teacher," that he would take responsibility for anything that happened to the "learner.")
6. Starting the path toward the ultimate evil act with a small, seemingly insignificant first step, the easy "foot in the door" that swings open subsequent greater compliance pressures, and leads down a slippery slope. (in the obedience study, the initial shock was only a mild 15 volts.) This is also the operative principle in turning good kids into drug addicts…
7. Having successively increasing steps on the pathway that are gradual, so that they are hardly noticeably different from one's most recent prior action. "Just a little bit more." (By increasing each level of aggression in gradual steps of only 15-volt increments, over the 30 switches, no new level of harm seemed like a noticeable difference from the prior level to Milgram's participants.)
8. Gradually changing the nature of the authority figure (the researcher, in Milgram's study) from initially "just" and reasonable to "unjust" and demanding, even irrational. This tactic elicits initial compliance and later confusion, since we expect consistency from authorities and friends. Not acknowledging that this transformation has occurred leads to mindless obedience (and it is part of many "date rape" scenarios and a reason why abused women stay with their abusing spouses).
9. Making the "exit costs" high and making the process of exiting difficult by allowing verbal dissent (which makes people feel better about themselves) while insisting on behavioral compliance.
10. Offering an ideology, or a big lie, to justify the use of any means to achieve the seemingly desirable, essential goal. (In Milgram's research this came in the form of providing an acceptable justification, or rationale, for engaging in the undesirable action, such as that science wants to help people improve their memory by judicious use of reward and punishment.) In social psychology experiments, this tactic is known as the "cover story" because it is a cover-up for the procedures that follow, which might be challenged because they do not make sense on their own. The real-world equivalent is known as an "ideology." Most nations rely on an ideology, typically, "threats to national security," before going to war or to suppress dissident political opposition. When citizens fear that their national security is being threatened, they become willing to surrender their basic freedoms to a government that offers them that exchange. Erich Fromm's classic analysis in _Escape from Freedom_ made us aware of this trade-off, which Hitler and other dictators have long used to gain and maintain power: namely, the claim that they will be able to provide security in exchange for citizens giving up their freedoms, which will give them ability to control things better.
"The Boys from Brazil" from Harper's 12/06 Readings. Excerpt from column by Arnaldo Jabor, an imagined interview with a Brazilian prisoner. Published 5/23/06 in /O Globo/. Translated by Valeria Mogilevich.
"The Battle for Guantánamo" Tim Golden NYT Magazine 9/17/06
Denial and Deception: an insiders view of the CIA Melissa Boyle Mahle
Influence: Science and Practice Robert Cialdini
Getting to yes : negotiating agreement without giving in Roger Fisher and William Ury (1983)
"The Experiment" the New Yorker July 11,18 2005 p. 60-71 by Jane Mayer.
The One Percent Doctrine: Deep Inside America's Pursuit of its enemies since 9/11 Ron Suskind (Simon and Schuster 2006)
"The Gray Zone; How a secret Pentagon program came to Abu Ghraib" The New Yorker, May 24, 2004 Seymour Hersh
“Exposure: the woman behind the camera at Abu Ghraib” New Yorker 3/24/08 by Errol Morris and Philip Gourevitch
The Interrogator’s War: The Secret War Against Al-Qaeda Chris Mackey with Greg Miller John Murray Publisher (London 2004)
"No blood, no foul: Soldiers' accounts of Detainee abuse in Iraq" Human Rights Watch, vol. 18 #3(G) NY July 2006
Stuart Klawans' review of The Road To Guantanamo The Nation 7/3/06)
Monstering: Inside America's Policy of Secret Interrogation (2007) Tara McKelvey
Blackwater: The Rise of the World’s Most Powerful Mercenary Army Jeremy Scahill (Nation Books/Avalon Pub. 2007)
Prisoner Without a Name, Cell Without a Number Jacobo Timmerman (198?)
One of the Guys: Women as Aggressors and Torturers Tara McKelvey, ed. (Seal Press, CA 2007)
Karaoke Fascism Karen Skidmore (2002)
Disappearing Acts by Diana Taylor
"Trauma and Performance: Lessons from Latin America" by Diana Taylor in PMLA (10/06)
Torture and Truth: America, Abu Ghraib, and the war on Terror Mark Danner (NYRB 2004)
OTHER SOURCES
"Be Black Baby!" section from Brian de Palma's film HI MOM!
Repetition film by Polish artist Artur Zmijewski shown at 2005 Venice Biennale
Griselda Gambaro play Information for Foreigners (“Información para extranjeros” (1987)
The Brig directed by Judith Malina. Living Theatre (196?)
Coco Fusco film Operation Atropos (2007)
“A Room of One’s Own: Women and Power in the New America” by Coco Fusco with intro by José Esteban Muñoz TDR 52:1 (T197) Spring 2008
LINKS:
Kubark Manual
Amnesty Guantanamo Project www.amnestyusa.org
No More Deaths/No Mas Muertos http://nomoredeaths.org
Philip Zimbardo www.LuciferEffect.com
http://www.prisonexp.org
Stanley Milgram http://www.stanleymilgram.com
Joseph Darby (soldier who smuggled Abu Ghraib photos to press and reported to press) interviewed in GQ September 2006 by Wil S. Hylton Http://men.style.com/gq/features/landing?id=content_4785/
http://www.complit.ucsb.edu/projects/tortureandthefuture/index.html
http://www.parqueecoalberto.com.mx/caminata.html
THANKS:
Counter Indications made possible through research grants from Arizona State University Herberger College of the Arts and the ASU School of Theatre and Film, as well as a 2008-2009 Artist Project Grant from the Arizona Commission on the Arts.
SPECIAL THANKS:
ASU School of Theatre and Film. Director: Linda Essig
ASU Herberger College of the Arts: Dean Kwang-Wu Kim
Sgt. Joel Tranter, Phoenix Police Dept.
Space 55: Shawna Franks, Steve Wilcox
Daniel Bernardi
Heidi Haru Ernst
Irum Shiekh
Lance Gharavi
David Coffman
Noel Saint-Pierre
Steven Kent
John Spiak
All who assisted in the development of this piece through workshops 2007-2008, without whose contributions we could never have made this: Steven Mastroieni, Amira De la Garza, Angela Giron, Sara Sanabia Baraldi, Steven Reker, Desiree Rowe, Aaron Carter, David McCormick. Boyd Branch , Scott Jacobson, Elizabeth Peterson, Keola, Stephanie Weisman, Joya Scott, Kimberlee Perez, Dustin Golz, Heather Harper, David Ojala, Mary Stevens, Michele Ceballos Michot, Arthur Sabatini, Carla Melo, Kristin Koptiuch, Seline Szkupinski-Quiroga, Kane Anderson,