Discontrol Party is a dispositif which brings together two worlds: that of state-of-the-art surveillance techniques and that of partying. The dancefloor/live music venue/performance space will appear in the dual spotlight of a partying event and a data-driven control and surveillance system (computer vision, RFID, recording by smartphones, etc.) The main space of the Gaîté Lyrique becomes for the space of one evening a night-club set up as a control room: far from light effects or other VJing, the participants, while partying, are confronted by multiple visualizations of the IT system which observes them and seeks to analyze their behavior.

Like a game presented to a focus group or a large scale Beta-testing, the challenge is launched: Can partying outplay the system? Lead it into a confusion which escapes it? Cause breakdown? Create a bug in the system? Because here, you are invited to a party where the “monitoring” by the dispositif on which you are acting is openly visible: the mappings and the listings of movements and behaviors, the attempts at interpretation, the raw images from the surveillance cameras, those same images transformed for and through automatic analysis, the representation of the activities of the IT systems and, further, the consequences of these activities in the virtual space of Second Life and the reciprocal infiltration of this universe into the party.

Surveillance and partying: if these worlds seem entirely opposed on all fronts, they both however are based on group – or even crowd – activities. But the former, most frequently destined for public spaces, focuses primarily on ordered crowd movements: a flow of persons, a line or waiting room, a boarding platform, etc. The rapid, disordered and even sometimes fusional movements of partying are at the limits of compatibility with the detection, tracking and aim to individually identify of the increasingly automatized dispositifs of surveillance and control: recognition of shapes, individuals, behaviors, traceability… In provoking their confrontation and possible overrunning of one world by the other, this prospective dispositif could reconnect with primitive traits of some of our oldest rituals: partying, celebrating, group celebration.

The musicians invited to incarnate the dispositif Discontrol Party are the evolutionary front-line of current electronic music: they are all experimenters, provocateurs. We can trust them to unleash a celebratory energy – with the verve and taste for danger of stunt riders – in the Discontrol dispositif : and to incite the spectators to do likewise !