Entr’actions: From Radical Transparency to Radical Translucency

Abstract

In 1998 I wrote an essay entitled “The Ante-Chamber of Revolution” that imagined Electronic Civil Disobedience (ECD) as performed by Electronic Disturbance Theater (EDT) 1.0 as a series of virtual entr’actes that were being performed in front of the social curtain of acts to come but never did. Instead they always remained in between code and gestures, in between streets and browsers, in between stories and performance art, and in between simulation and the embedded real. These entr’actions disturbed the possibilities of capture since no main act ever occurred; only the impossibility of it happened, only the radical transparency that nothing was behind the curtain of ECD.