… Or Press Escape

‘Finally, the PC is used as a concrete story-telling medium!’ - Moose (online theatre-magazine)

Somewhere in a large West European city. Late at night a women is sitting behind her computer. On the (enlarged) screen in front of her, the audience reads her interior monologue and digital dialogue. We deduct that she’s a stranger in town. She hears a strange noise coming from the floor above her. Is there an intruder in the building? Via e-mail she tries to establish contact with her neighbour. She writes and rewrites, edits, deletes, and spell-checks in a language that is not her own. Her attention is constantly being divided and diverted by new messages dropping into her mailbox, Web-surfing, entering chat-rooms, opening sometimes risky files, playing movies and sound clips… We hear a familiar soundscape: the buzz of the computer-ventilator, system noises, the (often emotionally revealing) way the keyboard is being struck… From all these dispersed elements a certain character gradually emerges, a person with a history and a story.
…Or Press Escape is mesmerising and intelligent ‘New Media’ in its purest form, way beyond the hype. Instead of trying to dazzle its audience with spectacular, high-tech, brain-dead software fantasies, Kaldor points in the opposite direction: towards the rich and diverse complexity contained in the activities and relationships of the person behind the computer.
‘The scene in which the computer informs its user that there is insufficient memory space and that files must be deleted is breathtaking. Look at me, the meddlesome computer seems to say, but as the woman clicks away all her open programs and files, she actually ends up looking at herself’ — Vrij Nederland
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concept & performance: Edit Kaldor; made by: E. Kaldor, Nicola Unger, Zsolt Mesterhazy, Catherine Henegan; software: Marc Boon; produced by: Theater Gasthuis (Amsterdam); in co-production with: Kunstlerhaus Mousonturn (Frankfurt).

in cooperation with: Slovenska kinoteka