Has the bot thot its last thot?
Local artist Rebecca Kopycinski made her curtain call at the curtainless Upstairs at Bow in Union Square. The performance was the final production of her one-woman play “Remediation,” part of the extended “Thotbot” universe that includes the multimedia art installation “ThotBot Implantation Center” and the podcast “After Impact.”
In “Remediation,” a piece of immersive theater, audience members are invited to imagine they are attending a meeting for the underground resistance group Omega and being recruited into its ongoing battle with a totalitarian regime called Ultra. In lieu of governing by consent, Ultra relies on advanced brain-programming techniques to control its citizens by tinkering with their “Thotbots.”
Whereas some are drawn to volunteer for self-programming, others rebel or become dissatisfied with the programming they’ve received. That’s where Omega comes in. The resistance force offers to “glitch” your Thotbot, short-circuiting ideological control, thereby freeing you for independent thought.
On its face, the Ultra/Omega binary looks like a classic showdown between a David and Goliath, in which our moral sympathies are as easily assigned as they are stimulated. We want to root for the little guy to come out on top. In an interview last October, however, Kopycinski cautioned not to accept everything that the resistance group offers at face-value: “Are you sure Omega is really the “good guys?””
If you enter into “Remediation” with this question in mind, what becomes obvious throughout the show is that whatever differences there are between the messages of Ultra and Omega, their medium is the same. The forces on both sides of the visible political spectrum in the Thotbot universe are using the tools and techniques of mass media to manipulate our sensibilities.
Which might make you wonder: is “glitching your Thotbot” a deprogramming or a reprogramming? Is there any original state, condition or “home” for the human mind, or are we always afloat and untethered in a sea of countervailing ideologies?
Ultra agents in white hazmat suits rushed the stage and hauled off the protagonist of “Remediation” before these questions could be finally answered. It was an Ultra raid on Omega headquarters, and it signaled the end of a certain kind of storytelling in the Thotbot universe. The kind that includes, in the words of Kopycinski, lugging around “old TVs” and other pop culture artifacts to odd locations for a few nights’ worth of performances. What started as an experimental musical called “Reagan Esther Myer,” evolved into a multiheaded dystopian narrative that rode our anxieties about life and politics under Trump like Atreyu rode Falcor. On Thursday the experiment breathed its final breath on stage.
The Thotbot universe may yet find life online, that off off off Broadway in the sky. New podcast episodes of “After Impact” are in production, no release date has yet been announced.
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