Joshua Sofaer

What is the future of bio-graphy?

Joshua Sofaer, Face It – Prognoses on Movement(s) from Two Antennas on Vimeo.

Navigating the Unknown, Joshua Sofaer’s recent work, is an introduction to the underlying principles of the performing arts. In a reference to Judith Butler, it states:

whereas the social performance of the person-role formula in our everyday actions has […] to do with the repetition of oppressive and painful norms […] to force them to resignify, the use of performance as a technique in the creative process is precisely about the radical choice that is denied in the social context. Performance itself […] is an engagement which gives rise to knowledge.

Sofaer’s works are attempts to transform conventional production and presentation formats in art and knowledge in such a way that not only the artist, but also the audience can experience performative processes as research: In the days when the phrase “lecture performance” was hardly known, he held talks that addressed audiences not as recipients of information, but as participants in a self-experiment.

Prognosis and oracle: »The Crystal Ball«

A recurring theme in Sofaer’s performances is the biographical, and this is also the perspective from which he has tackled prognosis and oracle. The description of the performance entitled The Crystal Ball reads like a perfect blueprint of our current project:

The Crystal Ball was an event that forecast the lives of the audience that attended. Presented as a sequence of one-to-one interactions, participants had their destiny revealed through professional consultations. Experts set up stall to predict the future lives of the audience in a series of snapshots compiled on site and presented to each participant before they left as This Is Your Life To Come. A troupe of sequinned ballroom dancers greeted each guest and shadowed their journey from one prediction booth to the next. Working as a spectacle for onlookers and a fortune telling for participants, The crystal ball put ticket-holder’s future in the picture. It’s Robert Wilson meets Mystic Meg. It’s Pina Bausch at a Spiritualist Meeting. It’s Miss High Leg Kick and Nostradamus at a Careers Fair… It’s The Future.

What is particularly fascinating about The Crystal Ball is the spectrum of “experts” assembled here, a panopticon of conventional and at the same radically different cultures of prediction between “face reading” and financial advice, occult media and career trainers.

From its position on stage, framed by the skilful arts of the dancer hostesses, The Crystal Ball provides its petitioners with a complete experimental set-up: What is particularly thought-provoking is the combination of the urgency of directly and personally addressing it, a feeling practically impossible to suppress despite all reservations, and the extreme diversity of the prediction procedures one is exposed to in quick succession. Under these conditions, any attempt to create distance to the biographical imputations of the “experts” leads almost inevitably to a reflection on the performance of the prognosis itself and its function in the social construction of individuality.

Experimental settings of biography

Sofaer also presents this experimental set-up by not grouping the experiences and reflections of the visitors or claiming them in any way for himself and his project. He reappraises his set-up solely by joining the visitors himself and, based on the personal predictions he receives, entering into research on prediction and biography.

Sofaer does not want to be an expert in prediction like those soothsaying for the public in The Crystal Ball are. But he’s an expert in the performance of prediction, and he has become this by pursuing his initially formulated precept – that is by using performance as the means to generate knowledge.

Future knowledge about the future

That is truly reason enough to assure oneself of his expertise. It occurs to one to ask him a question that follows on while at the same time aiming at the centre of our venture: How can the generation of knowledge of the future be organized in future – through the performing arts?

What methods (old, magical, new, scientific) can be used and how are they utilized and transformed by the performing arts? What is the role and the responsibility borne by the performers as organizers of knowledge processes here?

What might a biography of the future be?

Certainly Sofaer will not accept this question purely theoretically, but in the course of a case example that does justice to his particular perspective on prediction: the biographical element.

While a biography in the usual sense is always organized retrospectively, Sofaer’s question in the context of The Crystal Ball is: “What might a [..] biography of the future be?”

This question becomes especially productive when “biographical” is understood in its broad sense as bios graphein – “to write life”. This embraces the concept of all possible methods to ascribe meaning to life, or generally to produce knowledge from life.

Asking about the future in this context and one encounters a field in which the antiquated practices of prediction such as palmistry and face-reading blend into scientific and pseudoscientific methods such as physiognomy. The question of a bio-graphy of the future thus point to a biopolitical event with a difficult past. This makes the question of what happens when prediction is taken on by precisely this discipline of the performing arts all the more important.

Joshua Sofaer announces his performance Face it:

»What does the future hold for the citizens of Berlin?

In this performance lecture Joshua Sofaer will make a prognosis. He will foretell what lies ahead for the people of Berlin.

Sofaer has gathered together six expert representatives from in and around Berlin, each responsible for a different area of social wellbeing. These experts hold the future of Berlin in their hands: leading figures from the fields of diplomacy, the environment, politics, entrepreneurship, family and health. Each has sat for a photographic portrait. The six photographs have been amalgamated into a composite image, a seventh portrait which represents nothing less than the future potential of Berlin itself. The future of this face is the future of the citizens of Berlin.

This face of Berlin has been subject to rigorous structural analysis, psychogenic readings and telepathic investigations.

Come and see the face of the future of Berlin. Come and hear what lies in store for you.

Research Assistant: Florian Feigl

With the generous cooperation of Hans-Christian Ströbele, Dr Gülnaz Gönül-Aslan, Maike Senger, Dr Ottmar Edenhofer, Sabine Werth, and Ambassador Professor Peter Katjavivi.

With thanks to Dr Bernard Tiddeman, School of Computer Science, St. Andrews University, Scotland, and to Björn Reißmann, KulturFoto, Berlin.«