1- Cannibalistic, Social Dynamics of Power: We Are All Out at Sea - Emmalia Bortolon-Vettor, University of Guelph

Written during the post-WWII period, Slavomir Mrozek’s Out At Sea is an absurdist one-act play about three shipwrecked men named Fat, Medium, and Thin, who employ socio-political debate in deciding which man to eat. Fat is an unruly leader who, with the blind support of Medium, manipulates Thin into sacrificing himself. Thus, Out At Sea uses cannibalism and consumption as a means of establishing power. Mrozek’s work has recently been revisited by the Canadian experimental pop group Bonnie Trash whose newest release is an exploration of oppression in the context of consumption wherein they reinterpret Out At Seain a goth-rock context. Making use of McLuhan and Fiore’s (1968) theory of technology serving as amputations and extensions of the self, I argue that social media acts as a means of fragmenting the self into digital voices. One’s online presence is processed and then published onto forums where people consume one other in much the same way that entertainment and technology are consumed. In reinterpreting Mrozek’s play, Bonnie Trash incorporated contemporary critiques of established power dynamics, particularly the #MeToo movement into the script and embodied this examination within their song, Goodnight My Dear.

Bonnie Trash’s project of reinterpretation invokes varied compositional elements, one of which is the constant use of an underlying sound of a sea reinterpreted in different sonic contexts. For Goodnight, My Dear,the sea was a collection of voices from identified #MeToo victims performing Pauline Oliveros’ Tuning Meditation.Oliveros’ use of collective attentions serve as a model of response mechanisms in social media. #MeToo greatly amplified when a person logged on, saw the hashtag, understood the hashtag, and then participated by echoing the hashtag. This amplification of attention was simple and effectively overwhelming. Overall, this paper aims to explore how the digital voice is shared, digested, and acted upon.