Interactive multimedia performance, 60 min
Original musical score by Walad
Stage manager, live streaming and technical direction: Mido Sadek
Ask Me a Question is as much a social experiment as it is a performance. It examines how social media reshapes our attention span and our capacity for real-life interaction, and explores questions of vanity, selfhood, and self-representation in contemporary life.
The performance centres on a large screen that conceals me as the performer. For sixty minutes, I execute a continuous jump rope workout, live, while my projected image is subjected to a rotating series of Instagram-style filters. A countdown timer keeps the audience oriented throughout. Viewers are invited to participate: via an online platform, they can anonymously type questions that appear projected on the large screen facing them. This opens the performance to an unpredictable range of exchanges, repositioning the audience as both spectators and co-performers — and ultimately dissolving the distinction between the two.
Sixty minutes
Twenty-one of the filters applied in rotation to the live image of the performer across the hour, in the order they appeared. As the filters cycle, the audience’s anonymous questions accumulate on the right of the screen and the countdown runs down.
The questions
Typed anonymously by the audience during the performance and projected live on the screen facing them. Most were written in Egyptian Arabic; they appear here in English translation, in the order they arrived.
How do you feel right now?
Why were you wearing a mask?
How do you live without a nose?
Are you sad because you have no nose?
How do you snore without a nose?
Are you happy with the colour of your skin?
Are you afraid of being vulnerable?
What is time?
How has social media affected people’s lives in recent years?
Do you think Instagram is a legitimate platform to express emotions? (Data collection aside.)
Life is like a swing: one day down, one day up.
Ask us a question.
Can we all sing a song together?
Tell us something strange that happened to you while travelling.
If the audience were one single body, what would you want to know from it?
What’s your favourite filter?
Do you see yourself as a multidisciplinary artist?
When was the last time you cried?
Sing a song that expresses how you feel right now.
Is there an actual concept behind this performance? Or are we just laughing and having fun?
Who is the person you can be most authentically yourself with?
Is it possible to be an artist without self-confidence?
Aren’t those shorts a little short?
Narcissist.
Where’s the best shawarma?
How long will this situation last?
Are you bored of the questions?
Can someone else take over after you?
Are we in an episode of Black Mirror?
Where’s Batman?
I’m scared!
Will we explode when the timer stops?
What happens when the clock goes to 0?
The room
Behind the screen
Bassem Yousri 