Boris Nikitin «Erste Staffel. Making its debut in , the Big Brother house was the first social media machine of the twenty-first century: a handful of unknown people with no particular skills move in for one hundred days, watched round the clock by the TV-viewing public as they go about their day-to-day business—brushing their teeth, playing cards, sleeping, showering, making small talk, eating, having sex.
Their only link with the outside world was a video camera through which they shared their most intimate thoughts and feelings with the public every day. But the show was about more than putting private lives on show.
It was also a contest during which viewers voted to remove participants from the house, one by one. Their everyday lives became a matter of performance, on every level. Boris Nikitin, Erste Staffel. As soon as it launched, in in the Netherlands and in 63 other countries since, Big Brother became a subject of debate.
With its combination of everyday life, voluntary self-observation, staged authenticity, and competition, the format was a provocation. It was a democratic utopia, a dystopia, and a work of conceptual art all in one: a self-surveillance set-up, a self-updating readymade, a reality machine.
It also drove a paradigm shift: the fourth wall between private and public spheres was broken down once and for all from this moment on, we were all performers. For the twentieth anniversary of the first series in Germany, Basel-based theatre director Boris Nikitin had a replica made of the original Big Brother container as part of Erste Staffel.
