Bartlebabe

Between human and algorithm, a contemporary update of the Bartleby myth

Deze tekst is geschreven door Anna Franziska Jäger & Nathan Ooms. Meer informatie over de speeldata en de credits vind je hier.

What is the impact of increasing digitalization on our lives? How does this omnipresence of a new digital sphere change our very ways of thinking, feeling, loving and expressing ourselves? Meet Bartlebabe, a creature by Anna Franziska Jäger and Nathan Ooms, a figure between human and algorithm.

The twenty-first century appears obsessed with a distinctly new ideal of efficiency: constantly seeking out the next strategy to control and, if possible, market the unknown and unpredictable. The tendency summed up by mantras such as ‘less friction, more flow’ has now slipped out of the corporate boardroom into our intimate lives and relationships, granting them a contractual character: the boundaries of the interpersonal and intimate must be clearly defined, experiences and relationships are to be rationally and universally assessed.

The language of the twenty-first century itself reflects this tendency: writing and talking is being streamlined and standardised in all types of templates, emoji’s and gifs. How do these evolutions alter the way in which we express and conceive ourselves? Can we even escape the mentioned tendency?

The new ideology of the digital also evokes the old “I would prefer not to”-adage by Bartleby, a clerk in one of Herman Melville’s short stories. Bartleby’s obstinate default reply to every request has retained its place in popular culture due to its unsettling effect. Bartleby’s reply does not affirm, and yet it is not a pure refusal either; rather, it renders the system in which the young clerk is expected to function impossible.

Bartlebabe is a contemporary update of the Bartleby myth, although not necessarily aware of this herself. The new ‘Bartlebabe' appropriates different forms of template-language, flirts with its generic quality and transforms it into a jargon that instead of serving communication, obstructs it and questions its very objectives. In Bartlebabe, the third collaboration between Nathan Ooms and Anna Franziska Jäger, a mass of online content undergoes an epic distortion when released into the analog reality of the theatre, taking on increasingly monstrous features.