Remediating the Past, Imagining the Future
In the novel, the narrator encounters a group people hidden in the mountains of New Zealand. Among the Erewhonians, mechanisms like the watch, which were displayed by missionaries as technological novelties, are not met with wonder but with fear and aversion. Their rejection of technologies is implicit in the question of the Erewhonian prophet:
(Here, we hear not the prophet’s voice, but read the narrator’s transcription of a book written by the Erewhonian sage.) The argument that machines have consciousness ultimately pushes the Erewhonians to lock up all mechanisms as a means “nip mischief in the bud,” thereby forestalling the intrusion of machine consciousnesses on humanity. Both iterations of the play deploy an ouroboros-eque timeline in order to expose how technology has always been a part of Erewhon’s landscape. Rumblings of the ominous “Endo Fleace” indicate that Victorian narrator’s arrival signals the Erewhonian apocalypse. In the closing scenes of the play, the Victorian narrator enters a room where all the technologies have been locked away to find an iPad with a recording of Arthur (the twenty-first century discoverer of the Erewhon magic lantern lecture set). The recording reveals that after the show, the members of the audience leased beehive huts in Erewhon. Using the funds, Arthur invents time travel, thereby colonizing Erewhon before the Victorian narrator arrived. The mysterious “Endo Fleace” turns out to be the “End of Lease,” expelling the descendants of the original colonists and returning them to the civilization from which they came. In this way, both versions take the Erewhonian prophet’s statement about the pervasiveness of technology at face value. Throughout its iterations, the play imagines an Erewhon interwoven with technology to the point that a line cannot be drawn between the consciousnesses of those who inhabit that fictional space and the technologies that represent them.But who can say that the vapour engine has not a kind of consciousness? Where does consciousness begin, and where end? Who can draw the line? Who can draw any line? Is not everything interwoven with everything? Is not machinery linked with animal life in an infinite variety of ways?[1]
The Christchurch version of Erewhon uses the structure of a double screen to simultaneously represent and remediate Erewhon. The audience’s first view of Erewhon (at 13:20 in the video below) is a particularly rich example of this.
The image of Erewhon projected by the magic lantern becomes the focal point of the scene. Prowse’s chord progressions sonically echo the gentle rolling hills on screen, ascending and descending with graceful ease. The Victorian narrator, Shigg (played by Arthur), looks at the bucolic landscape before reaching for his iPhone. The iPhone’s camera appears on the second screen, becoming an extension of Shigg’s point of view. The simultaneous projection of macroscopic and microscopic views is further shaped by the narrator’s explanation that
The Biblical allusions in this narration closely follow the original vocabulary of the novel. His comments about Queen and Country are Arthur’s (the playwright's) additions. The ease in which Shigg transitions from reading the landscape through the lens of Biblical imagery to its potential as a colonial asset evokes the ways in which the lantern show was historically inextricably linked with commercial development and emergent trade networks. Particularly in the lantern shows of David Livingstone and the Crowthers, the introduction of Christianity went hand-in-hand with industrialization.It is such an expanse as was revealed to Moses when he beheld the Promised Land. The explorer’s dream. A lush, undiscovered country waiting only for the son of empire to deliver her to God, Queen, and — Country!
Representations of the lantern as a technology of colonial encounter and evangelism are expanded through the embodied practices of performance in the revised version of the play which debuted at the Edinburgh Fringe Festival in (2018).[2] In this iteration, Arthur uses a pith helmet and a posh British accent to distinguish between the character of the narrator, dubbed Lord Erewhon, and himself. After donning the helmet and pausing a moment in tableaux, Arthur explains
In trying to reinstate this boundary, Arthur calls attention to his own role as a mediator. The play grapples with the persistence of colonialism by presenting the lantern’s implication in this system while simultaneously converting it into a vehicle for new embodied practices of performance. My own approach to the lantern’s colonial past is fraught with the same challenges. On the one hand, this dissertation inevitably remediates the European perspectives that created the archive through which to study the lantern’s global history. At the same time, the dissertation’s digital form enables new modes of scholarly engagement with cultural heritage objects.When I speak in Lord Erewhon’s voice, which I imagine sounded just a little bit like this—[removes helmet] any racism, sexism, agism, homophobia, transphobia, and microaggressions are all on him. [audience laughs] Macroaggressions too.
By reintroducing the lantern as a technology of mediation in the context of theatre, Erewhon imagines a more ethical future for screen technologies. In its various locations, the play has been recorded and either made available through youtube or livestreamed through Facebook. Using social media in this way creates new opportunities for building international communities that participate in a shared, embodied screen experience as a means to promote critical reflection. In each of these performances, the phone broadcasting the event is passed around the audience. In this way, the shaking of the camera and the shifts in perspective record the tactile experiences that Erewhon’s audiences have with the technologies of remediation. The show’s digital remediation calls attention to the embodied practices of viewing across media, bringing together the audiences who were present at the show’s recording and the audiences who encounter the performance online. This dissertation participates in similar structures of performance and reflection. Presenting the lantern as part of a screen experience creates opportunities to couch this technology within its global history. Like the lantern in Erewhon, the improved phantasmagoria lanterns and dissolving views carried by John Williams, David Livingstone, Samuel and Dandeson Crowthers are best understood when embedded within their local cultural contexts, shining lights on their audiences.
[1] Erewhon, edited by Peter Mudford, Penguin Classics, p. 199.
[2] This version of the play Caveat NYC (October 2018) and the Taranaki Winter Fest, New Zealand (August 2019).