Nathan Sibthorpe on putting audiences through a lie detector test in the interactive show Truthmachine
Nathan Sibthorpe, artistic director of Australian company Counterpilot, on the sometimes fraught but always fascinating process of putting audience members through a lie detector test in their interactive show Truthmachine.
If you heard that I had experience conducting hundreds of lie detector tests, you might think I was an investigator, or a psychologist. But I have no such training. Actually, I just have a theatre degree. Yet somehow, over the past seven years, I have been responsible for interrogating hundreds of strangers, and what I’ve learned through this process has made me more comfortable with my own uncertainty.
In Truthmachine, we carefully select one audience member to be hooked up to a working lie detector and interrogated. It might feel random, but the first seven minutes of each performance involves a careful process of determining who is going to be most suitable.
From staging this work over 500 times, we’ve developed a bit of an instinct for who will make a good subject. We’re not looking for someone with good secrets, we’re looking for someone with the right amount of trepidation.
They have to be at least a little bit intimidated by the machine, which means they are in some way scared about the idea of truth. Often if you ask someone what they’re scared of people finding out, they don’t really know. They don’t have something in mind that they’re holding tightly, but there’s something broadly frightening about the idea of concrete truth, about the possibility that something dark and undignified could be right under the surface.
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Part of what fascinates me about lie detectors is they occupy a kind of mythic place in our cultural consciousness. Many of us know of them, but don’t necessarily understand them. Our assumptions about the device tend to border on magic. A mysterious box that can read your mind?
But of course, the lie detector can’t actually tell if you’re lying. It can tell if your body is responding, not what’s in your head but what’s in your heart rate, your breathing, your sweat. When polygraph examinations are conducted formally, it’s usually by a trained psychologist, and that human is the one responsible for making a judgement call about whether the subject is lying, based on complex interpretations of data.
In Truthmachine, the remaining audience becomes our examiners. We interpret the data through responsive technical design and algorithms, but it’s up to the humans in the room to decide whether they think any deception is underway. This can feel fraught at times, because we’re all uncertain creatures, and when faced with binary decisions often the instinct is to find ourselves somewhere in the middle.
We ask our subject a lot of questions throughout Truthmachine. I won’t spoil them all here, but my favourites tend to be questions they may have never answered for themselves before. Questions like: are you a good person?
This often makes them pause. Is it possible to have a true or untrue answer to that question? Is any such truth available to begin with? Watching someone’s detailed physiological response to answering that question always feels strangely intimate. When they do answer, it sometimes seems like they’re deciding in the moment, authoring a moment of truth for themselves in front of us. Deciding that they’re a good person.
When we first started making this show it was in response to a political impetus. ‘Post-Truth’ was Oxford Dictionary’s word of the year and amongst Trump’s precedents of fake news and alternative facts we were wondering if certain truths would ever be truly made clear. There was a lot of talk about collusion with Russia, for instance. Part of me wondered if there would ever be a denouement to that great global mystery.
But everyone was coming to terms with a standard of unknowingness that has broadly characterised the post-truth era. We don’t know, we probably won’t know, and for the most part people no longer seem to need to know.
As we started to play with polygraph machines, we became more interested in these ideas translating to a personal level. What could this standard of unknowingness mean for our personal truths, our own sense of self. In a world where the truth is no longer available or desirable, can we ever truly know ourselves? Our first instinct is to find this notion terrifying. But maybe in a numb kind of way, it can also be freeing?
As someone who came out as queer deep into my twenties, and grew up in conservative communities with a typical sense of repression, I used to wonder whether other people knew ‘my truth’ before I really knew it for myself. But thinking this way is to believe there’s a concrete version of myself, hidden somewhere under layers of deception. And who is that guy? What if he’s actually just an asshole?
I prefer to believe that we are always in flux. That some truths are malleable, to be determined in the right moment rather than excavated. Whether we’re in love with someone; whether we truly believe in something; whether we are in fact a good person. These aren’t for us to know so much as for us to decide.
In Truthmachine, nobody really remembers the answers that a subject gives by the end. But we all remember the way they feel while being interrogated. In this context, their nervousness is intoxicating. When a subject is nervous, it means they care about being seen - and this gives everyone else the opportunity to bear witness, and to accept them.
We have this ingrained idea that the truth is dangerous because we all have secrets that could expose us, humiliate us, shame us. But really the shame only works if it’s used against us - and most of our dirty laundry is more universal than we realise. After 500 performances, I can tell you - most people have stolen from the supermarket self-serve checkout.
And the really freeing part? You can totally cheat a lie detector test. With the right technique, the truth really can be whatever you make it. Come to see Truthmachine and we might just teach you how.
Truthmachine will be performed at various times, up to eight times a day, at C Venues C Alto from 7th – 30th August.
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