100 years in the future the sea level has risen, flooding San Francisco’s Financial District. Set inside a downtown “commune” (the future word for “office”), Bill: The Musikill guides the audience through a future in which the tech bubble never bursts, but inflates into the logical conclusion of the utopian tech dream: tech-enabled prosperity, leftist aesthetics and high profit margins.

Through jingles, musical remixes and excessive repetition, the protagonist Bill takes the audience on a tour of the CryOm company, introducing us to employees like Will, Guillermo, Wilhelm and Billiam while describing the many ways one might “Bill a bill from a billet in a building in Bilbao.” 

Comitta’s performance is a nod to the histories of sound poetry, a term which the Dadaist Hugo Ball coined 100 years ago, but has evolved into a number of approaches.

Program

7:00 pm           doors open
7:30 pm           performance begins
9:00 pm           doors close

Bios

Tom Comitta

Tom Comitta is an artist, writer and recent transplant from Oakland to Los Angeles. From 2011-12, Comitta composed and conducted nine operas with The San Francisco Guerrilla Opera Company, a roving ensemble that gave voice to texts at numerous sites around the Bay Area. In 2012 he staged National Novel Writing Night Month (NaNoWriNiMo), a futurist improvement on the popular write-a-novel-in-a-month contest in which he wrote, designed and published novels written in a night.

Related Events

Re:Dada exhibition
Nov. 5 – Nov. 30, M-F 1-5pm.

The Dadaglobe Project
Nov. 2, 2016, 6:30 – 8:30pm

Re:Dada exhibition opening and performances
Nov. 4, 2016, 7 – 11pm

The Dada Divas
Nov. 13, 2016, 7:30 – 10pm

Cloud Culture: Digital Collections and the public domain
Nov. 16, 2016 6:30 – 10pm

Images: Top: Tom Comitta at the Bemis’s Open Studios, July 2016. Photo: Mike Machian. © Bemis Center for Contemporary Arts. Bottom: Colin Conces. © Bemis Center for Contemporary Arts.