Review: 100 Proofs The Earth Is Not A Globe

A portal to the unknown. Image: Shea Bresnehan/Theresa Harrison

100 Proofs the Earth is Not a Globe
Starring: The Tape Projects collective, You.
Appearing at: Festival Club, 1000 £ Bend, 361 Little Lonsdale Street, Melbourne, for the 2010 Next Wave Festival

Imagine that you have fallen into a live movie adaptation of an unknown Philip K Dick novel, but instead of Tom Cruise or Arnold Schwarzenegger in leading roles, you’ve now been put in charge of the action. This goes some way toward explaining the surreal experience that awaits at 100 Proofs the Earth is Not a Globe, the ambitious Next Wave festival piece from Tape Projects (TAPR).

The experience makes the audience active participants in an elliptical narrative that the collective has described as “part science project, part religious intervention.” It is the culmination of months of work, assemblage of video art, and public forums and debates run by TAPR.

100 Proofs is named after the 19th-century treatise by one William Carpenter, who in a world of constant scientific discovery and invention remained doggedly convinced that the earth was flat. Carpenter wrote indignantly that: “the idea that, instead of sailing horizontally round the Earth, ships are taken down one side of a globe, then underneath, and are brought up on the other side to get home again, is, except as a mere dream, impossible and absurd!” This faith found later adherence in the 20th century with the work of the Flat Earth Society; according to the internet the belief continues into the present.

For Tape Projects, the flat earth becomes a potent starting point for an enquiry into the limits of socially assembled knowledge. 100 Proofs commences with an astral coach trip, complete with a “black box” MP3 player and eye covers for full geographic disorientation (admittedly, whether we are really on the moon or at Moonee Ponds is something you’re going to have to decide for yourself!). The group is taken to a split-level, cutting-edge space facility: a setting that is pure science-fiction blockbuster, complete with American computer accents, aliens and laboratories.

I’m not going to ruin the experience that follows for those who have tickets to this event. Suffice to say that different roles divide our group in thought-provoking ways; what follows is a kind of real-life puzzle that requires concentration, patience and much conversation on the journey back to earth to corroborate the evidence for what exactly just happened.

100 Proofs takes as its premise that the average person doesn’t know a whole lot about science, and throws to the participant a staggering cross-media array of data, images, screens, characters and activities. Making sense of this non(sense) is the point. For me, I thought about Foucauldian power relations and the “truth” that is mediated through Hollywood fiction, and of our culture in which evolutionary theory jostles against atheism.

Given that video media is TAPR’s privileged visual form, 100 Proofs is a timely reminder of the uses to which live filmed events are put as markers of the real. For those who will miss this live performance, 100 Proofs has an online component as well, and some of the video art can also be viewed on a Vimeo channel created for the event.

100 Proofs the Earth is Not a Globe is part of the Next Wave Festival until Friday 28 May. Tickets have now sold out; however there is a waiting list available at the Next Wave Hub for unclaimed tickets on the night. Information can be found here.

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