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Serial Nostalgia: Rimini Protokoll's 100% City and the Numbers We No Longer Are

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  12 November 2018

DOUGLAS EACHO
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Abstract

Now a decade old, Rimini Protokoll's 100% City continues to stage civilians as statistical samples. Considering the project as a series, this paper proposes that ‘seriality’ governs not just the project's touring model, but also its creation of individuals, populations and a homogeneous group of ‘diverse’ metropolises. These serializations are a foundational part of the project of statistical reason. Surveying the nineteenth-century origins of these practices and their early public articulations, and contrasting these practices with the newly emerging regime of ‘big data’, this paper argues that this serial logic is in fact a nostalgic one. 100% City’s celebration of statistics, however troubling, appears as a comforting articulation of a social model now dissolving in favour of algorithmic enumerations of peoples. The statistical project has long been tied to the theatre, while data analysis may articulate a limit to theatrical representation.

Type
Articles
Information
Theatre Research International , Volume 43 , Issue 2 , July 2018 , pp. 185 - 200
Copyright
Copyright © International Federation for Theatre Research 2018 

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Footnotes

This essay was developed with the help of the 2017 American Society for Theater Research (ASTR) Working Group on Extra/Ordinary Bodies of Data and Surveillance, convened by Elise Morrison and James Harding. My breakout group – Lindsay Brandon-Hunter, Jacob Gallagher-Ross and Paul Rae – provided essential provocation for this argument. Many thanks to the precise, clear feedback from my anonymous reviewers, and to Shane Denson here at Stanford.

References

NOTES

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