Lost in space, time and technology

In 1971, 80-year-old grandmother Sarah Krassnoff collapsed and died of jet lag - after flying 167 times non-stop between New York and Amsterdam. Krassnoff was travelling with her 14-year-old grandson, whom she was apparently keeping away from his father. Whenever they landed, they simply turned around and took the next flight back. For four months, they lived in a fog of shifting time zones and a world consisting entirely of aeroplanes and transit lounges.

Two years earlier, lone British sailor Donald Crowhurst vanished at sea during a round-the-world yacht race, after months of radioing back his recordbreaking speeds. Eventually, his empty boat was found drifting in the mid-Atlantic.

On board were videotapes he'd made, a diary revealing his mental breakdown, and two parallel ship's logs. One told the story the British public had been following - of a lightning trip around the world, through the Roaring Forties, via the Indian Ocean. The other revealed the truth. After a few demoralising days at sea, he had started to falsify the radio reports of his progress. In 1969, there had been no global positioning satellite to reveal his real whereabouts. Far from circumnavigating the globe, Crowhurst had never even left the Atlantic Ocean.

The names have been changed, the storylines fictionalised, and the words invented, but these two episodes are the basis of Jet Lag. Although set on a stage, in a theatre, Jet Lag is emphatically not a play. So says Mark Uhl, managing director of award-winning New York theatre group The Builder's Association. Uhl describes his company's fusion of video, installation, sound and acting as "more of a performance. It's about mixing live presence with technology. The technicians are performers too - they take a curtain call."

Jet Lag is the brainchild of architects Diller + Scofidio, who were inspired by two headline-hitting stories. Working in collaboration with The Builder's Association, Elizabeth Diller and Ricardo Scofidio have designed a multimedia set which engulfs both actors and spectators in a narrative about becoming lost in a technological limbo. "We aim to make you seasick for the first half, and airsick for the second," says Uhl, half-jokingly.

Thirty years on, Crowhurst and Krassnoff have metamorphosed into the characters Roger Dearborn and Doris Schwartz and face the contemporary issues of how easily technology and the media enable us to make events up. "The media itself," says Jet Lag's director Marianne Weems, "is a protagonist."

In Jet Lag, the failing Dearborn is under pressure to supply a pushy publicist, a hungry press and an adoring wife with reports of his speedy progress. His only contact with the real world is via radio. Success is what is required of him, so he fakes it. He lies to the video camera as, dressed in oilskins, he throws water over his face, and sways from side to side to give the impression of passing through stormy seas. The video is projected on to a large screen as Dearborn films it onstage, in front of a sea backdrop.

Of course Dearborn doesn't even need to be at sea to fake his journey. He could just as easily be "virtually" travelling in his garage at home - or on a stage - and feeding fraudulent reports. "Dearborn's story," according to Weems, "is about lag of information, the gap between the image portrayed and the reality."

The second part opens with a video of Schwartz and her grandson, Lincoln, wandering through a deserted airport terminal at 3am. The clip is then rewound on a security camera and replayed, rewound and replayed again, as though to prove the existence of these eternally transient beings.

Schwartz and her grandson are perpetually in motion - yet going nowhere. They sit on simulated aircraft, and stand still onstage, their movement eerily manufactured by moving escalator backdrops. In this space-less, time-less universe, Schwartz tries in vain to create a domestic environment for her grandson, cleaning airport chairs, regulating mealtimes. But, exhausted by continuous travel, she loses track of events and dies.