January 17, 2009 - New York, Berlin, Toronto, London, Moscow: Created by Paolo Cirio, The Big Plot is a romantic spy-story played on the info-sphere. It looks at the role of espionage in intrusions into people’s internet lives, the dysfunctional sociality that is being created by media communications, the political use and exploitation of social networks. Four characters will tell a story using dialogues shown on YouTube videos, blog posts, and via entries on their Facebook profiles.

The cloned identity of a real spy will be used as a plot device for telling a story about the political and sentimental weakness of our era, which are accelerated by the compulsory use of personal media and social networking platforms. The compromised privacy on this kind of media and the political control over the Internet will be some of the most important issues of the story. Audiences will have an active role in the story as well they will be able to interact with the characters. Performances in public environments will complete the set of stages where the story will be acted.

It’s your worst neurosis of your life.
It’s the most meaningless conspiracy in history.
It’s a spy fiction about your intimate secrets and personal data over internet.

A story dispersed in more than seven cities, across several media platforms and among a cluster of actors who lead a tour in some of the most poignant sentiments of the human condition. The worst obsessions of your era and your hearts are transposed onto many stages, where degenerate souls with insatiable fixations are trying to give sense to their life.

Facebook – Youtube – Flicker – BlogSpot – Twitter – MySpace - Linkedin This genetic modification of storytelling utilizes multiple forms of media and stages, which are recombined in order to immerse the spectator in a story of a real world. The fluid recombination of identities and of their interpersonal connections via several media in a non linear time line allows for Recombinant Fiction, a multi-platform, multi-channels and cross- media form of storytelling.

Love - espionage - sentiment - hate – politics - corruption – turmoil are rendered in a form of fiction which doesn’t treat the spectator as a consumer, contemplating a completed piece of art in a tv-box, theatre or museum, but rather as something unfinished. The Big Plot is an immersive Recombinant Fiction, which needs an active investigation by an audience, who must follow clues in several stages in order to compile the whole story. So now you can take the responsibility of creating your own show!

The audience is sent on an intimate voyage into the secret lives of four bipolar characters, who struggle hopelessly with the planning of a big plot against their society.

Who knows what that plot is?
Which is the real plot?
Does it really exist?

Public actions – parades - civil disobediences – propaganda – conventions it’s the most colorful revolution of the last political movement, it’s absolutely black. It’s the political movement. It claims revolutionary things and it does conservative things. Its adepts are right-wing but they think and act like leftists. It’s the triumph of the dictatorship of populism. It’s the glory of political stereotypes. It is against the meaningless of our era, but it’s the most nonsense ever thought of. This is psychopathic politics led by schizophrenic and maniacal people who have completely lost their sense of reality and their capacity for rational thought.

They are absolutely dangerous people. They want to obtain power with a plot, but they don’t know what that plot is – and it’s absolutely absurd. It sounds comic. But it’s tragic, because exploiting narratives is usual and necessary in order to fabricate and control political history and identity in the real world, if we can still call it real.

Where are the boundaries? Do they exist? Is it fiction that influences our world or does the real rule? This is the reason why The Big Plot is a meta-narration and a recursive story that will push the limits of narration and of reality as common idea. It is a story of stories because it discloses how reality is usually built by narrative codes, which combine to create a consensual truth. Engineering events and identities, and therefore reality, is a narration that is reconstructed and deconstructed through the art of language and storytelling.

The Big Plot is a nightmare under the effects of networking amphetamines, visions of your misery mirrored in the stories of defeatist fanatical people.

It’s the contemporary linguistic paradigm - a dizzyingly schizophrenic and dystopian vortex of useless communication that proceeds without any possibility of causing pragmatic change.

It’s the contemporary social paradigm - an implosion of sociality and explosion of intimacy. The personal privacy paradoxically exhibited as more important than common interests, loneliness and the collapse of public spheres under the glory of private life. Gossip wins over political fact, the ego over the world.

It’s the contemporary imagination - paranoia of conspiracy about private and public life as a dominant theme of everyday life. A constant search for the story behind the story distracts us from really listening to each other and seeing the world as it really is.

It’s the drama of an end of a love - an end of the love of trusting beliefs and moral integrity. A dead love. It’s the end of monolithic parties, beliefs and nihilism, which defined the last century.

It’s the final redemption - the peaceful reunion with the Global Conscience Revolution that is coming, after the disaster.

Project Supported by Werkleitz Center for Media Art, Halle, Germany and SocialEast Seminar on Art and Espionage, London.