Durham author and playwright Monica Byrne is known for raveling disparate strands of gender, race, and love in speculative social orders, from the acclaimed novel The Girl in the Road to the ambitious play Tarantino’s Yellow Speedo. Last February, she added to that list with For My Wife, Navid, a story commissioned by Chris Anderson and then performed live at TED 2016 in Vancouver.
The performance, in which Byrne portrays a hologram (aided by clever lighting and digital glitch effects), went up on TED’s website today. “From what I heard afterwards, a full third of the audience thought I was actually a hologram. Pretty awesome,” Byrne says. “It’s the first time they’ve ever done fiction on the main stage, so no one knew how to react until several beats after I walked offstage.”
Sink into this eerily moving tale of posthuman love below.
