Interesting New Play Combines Technology and the Arts
“User 927″ is a new 90-minute play based on the search log of a real-life person. The person’s identity is still unknown. It has been said that the play continues the trend of integrating technology into the arts.
Personally I think it is brilliant and fascinating!
“It’s the world’s first play based on a search log,” director Michael Alltop said.
“User 927,” (being done in Philadelphia) is a blend of fact and fiction in the tale of a disappearance from a small Midwestern town.
The story’s central clue is the real life (bizarre) search log of an AOL subscriber — identified only as User 927 — that was released to the public two years ago.
It is a bizarre string of search terms, indeed: Dying Elmo. Mange. Human mold. White camellia.
Alltop said he was astonished when AOL intentionally released 19 million search requests made over three months by more than 650,000 subscribers. The logs were released to help academic researchers, but they were quickly posted on a public site and circulated after a Blogger discovered them.
AOL substituted numeric IDs for the subscribers’ real user names, there were enough clues for The New York Times and The Washington Post to track down two of the users and identify them by name.
The identity of User 927 is still unknown though.
Director Alltop was fascinated enough by that subscriber’s strange queries to commission a 90-minute play around the search log.
30-year-old writer Katharine Clark Gray (a friend of Alltop) created a story of a mother and her teenage daughter who move from Brooklyn, New York, to fictional Osterville, Indiana, in search of a simpler life.
Mom declares a techno-free summer (no internet!) Daughter Deena (14) sneaks off to the library and uses a computer there. With two friends she made online, Deena begins exploring an actual Web site that has copies of the AOL search logs (one of many created in the aftermath of the release).
Audience members see the queries on screens overhead as Deena and her friends dive into the logs, glimpsing the lives of some users.
The trio’s interest in User 927 was due to previous visitors to the site giving that log high ratings.
Their searches in the library become important later when someone from Osterville disappears. Alltop doesn’t reveal who.
Fictional investigators in the play try to find the missing person by tracing User 927’s identity.
“This search log, to me, is a character,” Alltop said. “It’s like a guided tour through a polluted mind.”
Steve Jones, a communications professor at the University of Illinois in Chicago, sees validity in exploring whether you are what you seek.
He questions whether one’s personality can really be gleaned from one’s searches, noting that when retail sites like Amazon.com Inc. recommend products based on past queries, they are not always on the mark.
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