Lecture Performance & Data Experiment
Zehn X Freiheit / RuhrBühnen PACT Zollverein, Essen, 2022
Concept, Text, Music by LAOKOON (Cosima Terrasse, Moritz Riesewieck, Hans Block)

In “Before my very I”, the group Laokoon, initiate a live data experiment on stage in front of an audience. We analyze the personality of an audience member - solely on the basis of this person's anonymous digital data. In doing so, we apply the data analysis skills we acquired for “Made to Measure” and develop them further.

Live audience, 4 selected data sets and an in-depth analysis.

Who is the person behind the data? The show begins by asking the audience to stand up. Gradually, the initial insights from the Google data are used to find the four people who willingly sent in their data in advance.

“Please sit down if you have never thought about joining the military”.

“Please sit down if you have no particular relationship with equestrian literature”.

The questions follow each other in rapid succession until each person stands alone behind each data set in question. We repeat this process until we have the four people we have selected and who have provided their data on stage with us. Of the four data sets, however, only one is analyzed in depth.

The audience members 1 Ocean 5 is a widely recognized psychological assessment tool. can refine their guesses about who they might be with each new insight. As the show progresses, more and more information about the selected dates is revealed: How does the person score on the Big Five Model 1, given their taste in music?

How does the person perform when their taste in movie genres is taken into account? Are there correlations that tell us something about deep-rooted patterns? Can we find out something that the experiment participants might not even have known?

*Ocean 5 is a widely recognised psychological assessment tool.