Everyone Thinks the Same Thought

A commissioned premiere for Nuit Blanche Toronto 2016

How susceptible are we to the lure of collective thinking? Everyone Thinks the Same Thought is a speculative shared experience—a journey into a possible future that audiences can take together.

As visitors arrive at the glowing, colorful, architectural installation, a friendly crew of Thought Attendants will invite them to step into a collective mindspace, in which a single thought is distributed using sound, video, text and performance. Inside the freestanding walls, surrounded by projection surfaces, screens and speakers, audiences will be enticed to abandon themselves to the moment and experience one thought together. Every few minutes the installation will reset and a new thought will pulse through the structure.

Surreal and darkly comic, the installation references retro-futuristic films of the 60s and 70s such as Woody Allen’s Sleeper and Kubrick’s 2001: A Space Odyssey. And yet it is hauntingly of the moment.

We have arrived at a future, after all, in which individual thought is unnervingly malleable. We live in an interconnected age, lulled by media and mesmerized by social technologies that shape our collective behavior. Do these technologies limit the more expansive, wilder, individualistic, potential range of human thought? Are we becoming more ‘me’, or more ‘we’?