Average Happiness - Bas Vanderschoot

What starts as a neat PowerPoint presentation full of graphs and linear equations slowly gets stuck. Slides start to stutter, a glitch flickers across the screen, and a creaking sound tears the presentation open. From that white grid, something new grows: a spreadsheet called ‘Reality.xlsx’. The neurotic alter ego of Bas Vanderschoot literally maps himself out: his life is shown in the form of graphs and diagrams. With spreadsheets and formulas, he builds an absurd digital world that slowly detaches from reality. The more tabs he opens, the more complex and darker the world becomes. The empty desert turns into a city of numbers: graphs rise like skyscrapers, arrows swing like vines, data points swarm like birds. The rational presentation degenerates into a fever dream of data in which the boundary between human and number blurs. With LED screens, projections, and cardboard diagrams, he builds a new landscape each time, each with its own logic, its own inhabitant, its own madness. During that digital dream, he meets various figures: a talking paperclip, a cynical crypto-miner, the imaginary number 5i, and even the search history of his deceased father. In seemingly philosophical conversations, they look for support together, but Bas’ own vulnerability and sadness constantly seep to the surface. ‘Average Happiness’ is a theatrical search for the meaning and nonsense of mapping out our happiness and sense of purpose. A visual solo performance inspired by the film of the same name by the Swiss animation filmmaker Maja Gehrig and by the music of the American hyperpop artist Galen Tipton.