Faust Shop presents:

The FAUST SHOP is a strange and fascinating place, an augmented installation that has appeared in an unassuming shopping centre and invites the passer by inside to explore the Faustian pacts we make in our daily engagement with technology. Stepping into this pop-up shop, you will find stories that straddle the divide between the virtual and the real with characters appearing onscreen as well as in the flesh through motion capture and digital art. The installation also showcases digital objects submitted in response to a public call for donations.

Here, you will be offered the opportunity to re-claim your digital soul, the information that we trail behind us as we make our way through the online world. This digital twin, produced by AI-driven technology, draws on the sum of our connections, mouse and eye movements, steps, interests, search terms, beliefs, and clicks on the ‘I agree’ button. How do we feel about this ghostly self? What would we do to rescue it? How happy are we to let it linger on forever in a place like this?

Research-based and combining the talents of numerous academics, performers, artists and more, FAUST SHOP asks you to join its artistic community to consider the impacts of technology. It offers us the world – but what does it want in return?

The FAUST SHOP installation is a more relaxed accompaniment to the performance piece ‘New Lands’ which is also taking part inside the Faust Shop. This mixed reality exhibition can be explored in your own time, and is presented as part of a research project on Re-staging public spaces, led by Research Fellow Dr Annja Neumann at Cambridge Digital Humanities. It is supported by Cambridge Digital Humanities, Space Popular, a research driven architecture, design, and media studio, Sook Space, and the School of Creative Industries at Anglia Ruskin University.

External partners and sponsors:

Sook Space, Adaptive Retail Space

Anglia Ruskin University, Cambridge School of Creative Industries

Space Popular, Architecture, Design and Media Studio

Creative team:

Dr Annja Neumann: Co-director and co-writer

Alexander Mentzel, Co-director and co-writer

Dr Kirk Woolford, Artistic technical director

Rebekah King, Artistic Producer and Research Assistant

Dr Eva Aymamí Reñé, Movement director and dancer

Cast:

Sylvia Keck, Poet

Olivia Railton, Director

Michelle Zhang, Homunculus

Oscar Hudson, Intellectual

Johanna Freistedt, Wagner

Linseigh Green, Faust I

Maddy Power, Mephisto I/Comic

Imogen Gray, Mephistopheles II

Lingquan Kong, Technologist/Shop Assistant II

TBC, Wealthy Collector

Alex Mentzel, Shop Assistant/Faust II

Further events presented by the FAUST SHOP project:

FAUST SHOP: New Lands, a performance at Sook Space

The Magics and Mechanics of Virtual Travel, CDH Open with Space Popular

For further information about the FAUST SHOP project click on www.faust-shop.org and the Cambridge Digital Humanities research page.

Tickets:

This event will be held in person. Please get in touch if you have access requirements. There are no age restrictions for the installation.