Tim Carlson, Canadian writer and developer of Theatre Conspiracy’s much-anticipated play Foreign Radical, has been fixated with cyber-surveillance, privacy and the violation of civil liberties for several years. But it was only after Edward Snowden’s revelations of global surveillance programmes in 2013 that he began to understand the depth and magnitude of these issues in our digitally-saturated world. Gradually, a daring and challenging new theatrical work emerged. “Initially what I was interested in was cyber warfare,” Carlson explains, when asked what made him want to explore these themes in the interactive, game show-style piece. “That was [in the] six months leading up to the Snowden revelations, and of course that made everything a little bit deeper and more interesting when it comes to issues of security, personal freedom and racial profiling. And so the question became: ‘How do we theatricalise those concerns?’ We wanted to look at – sort of, physicalise, say – what we do on social media. We debate, we argue, we rant, we share, we collaborate, and so those kinds of things happen in different scenes between audience members.”
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