LULZ, NOON

A western by C.S. Tolan

From this valley they say you are going
We will miss your bright eyes and sweet smile
For you take with you all of the sunshine
That has brighted our pathway the while

LULZ, NOON is a whispered play about surveillance, control, secrets, typed characters, permissioned environments, and the horror and ecstasy of losing oneself in desire, in devices.

Listen through headphones.

The play opens with Eve, the eavesdropper, peeping two generic hackers, Alice and Bob. Facing a crisis of trust, Alice and Bob are in a standoff over Charlie, the courier, who has inserted himself into their relationship, hijacking it in defiance of his type: a neutral mediator.

Bob and Charlie are obsessed with Lulz. Having stolen a catalogue of ancient Lulz from Alice’s device, Charlie hopes to use their power to root his ruleset, change his permissions, transcend his type.

Eve clues us in:

The story goes like this. Lulz. Accreted in veins all around the mesa. Some new. Some ancient. The hackers here are peeping new veins, which they root to get their kicks – pranks, spoofs, the like. Aged veins, they’re more powerful and rare — and it’s against the rules to root them. Rumor is the aged veins still belong to the old folks. They’re guarded by Sybil. She’ll eat you up! But Sybil, I’ve never seen her. And I see everything. Just about. So I think Sybil’s maybe just overexposure. To a certain kind of desire – a certain kind of device.

Does Sybil exist? The monster hangs over the mesa like the incoming storm, whose static clouds are curtains on the horizon. Will Sybil emerge to enforce the play’s permissions as scenes spiral out of control, as boundaries are crossed, as characters degrade their types, threatening compilation errors?

The play LULZ, NOON was originally commissioned by the Articulating Data project at The University of Edinburgh, funded by a Chancellor’s Fellowship in GeoSciences (University of Edinburgh and Scottish Funding Council), with additional funding from the Edinburgh Futures Institute.

Claire Tolan is an artist. She wrote, performed, and produced the play. Thanks to LC, HL, IWL, LM, SM, CS, and GS.

They will bury me where you have wandered,
Near the hills where the daffodils grow
When you’re gone from the Red River Valley
For I can’t live without you I know