In her 2017 book Duty Free Art, Hito Steyerl describes the distinction between signal and noise as an organizing principle for the data-fueled society of our moment, but not only for the society of our moment. Signal versus noise, she suggests, has been operative practically since we began sorting sound into meaning; it’s just that now, humans are less frequently the ones distinguishing between the two.[i] On the judgments of computers processing at great scale hang consequential things like life and death and human connection and the future of nationhood and the safety of individuals and populations as a whole.

Dakota Parobek’s Correspondence is, at first glance, a little signal and a lot of noise. At the most pedestrian level, our literary minds are unaccustomed to assimilating receiving numbers as part of a dramatic text, but in Correspondence, long strings of digital code vastly outnumber recognizable words. “All text is visible and/or read,” Parobek’s opening stage directions instruct, forestalling any temptation on a director’s part to make supposed sense out of alleged noise on the audience’s behalf.

But lest we be tempted to mistake apparent illegibility for abstraction, Parobek also offers a drama with a setting and characters and a plot: Two friends are trying to find one another during a catastrophic snowstorm in northern Kentucky. Their names are Friend #1 and Friend #2: like signal and noise, they exist only in relation to one another. Stage directions (or voice-over announcements, or projected text) inform us that massive snowfall is expected in the counties surrounding Louisville, the counties close to the Ohio River that marks Kentucky’s border with Indiana.

I have never been to Kentucky, but I wanted to see what Parobek meant. I found these counties on Google maps in fractions of a second. Their URLs reflect coordinates in geographical and digital space:

https://www.google.com/maps/place/Shelby+County,+KY/@38.2260193,-89.6973558,6z/data=
!4m5!3m4!1s0x8869b841b6710047:0x345961b6387fd759!8m2!3d38.1778076!4d-85.2308414 

Maybe these letters and numbers help me imagine a catastrophic snowfall in Shelby County, KY, or the action in Correspondence. But really the numbers aren’t for me. They’re for my laptop. Which is the implication of Parobek’s text: a performance language that gives an internet view of the world, not a human one. In a forthcoming essay, Jacob Gallagher-Ross coins the term “interface theater” to describe performances that stage the digital device’s view of reality—instead of, or in dialogue with, the human view. Correspondence does this to a certain extent. We’re not expected to know what the long strings of numbers mean, just that Friend #1 and Friend #2 are talking through them or with them or both. The numbers are for devices, and for those devices to continue making sense of those numbers, they need continual access to power and memory and server space. These are resources that, as the artist Trevor Paglen has pointed out time and again in his photography and public lectures, do not float in a metaphorical “cloud” but instead rely on enormous cables and server farms whose power needs are contributing to the climate catastrophe that may even be one of the root causes of disaster-level snowfall in northern Kentucky. Thus do Parobek’s sound and signal follow one another in a loop, rather than opposing one another in a binary.

But Parobek’s world of digits is more complicated, and evolving still. Some of the numbers have meanings (there are codes indicating each friend is present, waiting, in a state of attention). In fact, Friend #2 waits for Friend #1 for a long time, maybe forever. “The final sequence continues ad infinitum,” notes Parobek, recalling the alluringly endless repetitions that closed many of the short dramatic texts in Suzan-Lori Parks’s 365 Days/365 Plays.

In Parks’s 365 Plays, repetitive stage directions often signaled either unending catastrophe (in one, an endless series of veterans returns from an endless series of wars) or an aperture looking toward utopia (in one of the collection’s “Constants,” meant to be performed at any point in the cycle, one unnamed person watches over another so they can rest, for as long as that may take). Parobek’s stage directions are similarly active and similarly expansive. As the two friends wait, stage directions take over and address the audience directly. “THE WORLD HAS BECOME A HAZARD,” they explain. “LIKE HOW IT WAS BEFORE WE WERE HERE.” The part of the play that we thought was background: that’s the story. Not our signals or our noise. Not us. This is a play for the end of the Anthropocene, where driving snow and sentient computers survive us all.

[i] Hito Steyerl, Duty Free Art: Art in the Age of Planetary Civil War (New York: Verso, 2017), 31-38.