ATTENTION IS A SCARCE RESOURCE

A dinner party is subject to the whims of invisible forces as electric muscle stimulation technology controls the movements of guests. The work is an anthropologically-focused performance exploring the impact of mediated interruption on the everyday. Mediated interruption creates a compulsion in its users to engage with those interruptions. The systems through which such disruptions take place – and upon which they are predicated – neither prioritise user needs nor consider the effects of interrupting users. As the dinner party progresses, both group cohesion and individual intentions are compromised as social conventions and personal culpability for transgressions break down. In this way the work provides an interrogation of the values at work in interrupted social spaces – both those values it embodies and those it functions to compromise – and the forms of social organisation with which it plays havoc.