Allison Berkoy: Company

Allison Berkoy presents Company, an interactive multimedia experience of stories, games, and performances. Guests enter an installation environment suggesting a living room. They meet a life-sized figure protruding from a canvas, enlivened through video projection, with an invitation to stay. The figure makes requests of guests, discloses stories and secrets in absurd and sometimes uncomfortable progressions, and entertains.

Company creates an illusion of complex interaction through location-based triggers and a video bank of responses. The figure appears to test her visitors, reacting to guests’ decisions to obey or refuse requests. Her behavior changes more radically amid larger gatherings of company versus the company of lone potential-companions; with each get-together she adjusts her level of intimacy accordingly.

Induced by guests’ actions, in combination with branching and randomized script pathways, each encounter with Company unravels divergently and indeterminately. The first prototype of Company exhibited at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute and received a grant for continued development from RPI’s Center for Cognition, Communication, and Culture.