A BUNKER FRIDAYS PUBLIC TRIBUNAL
The People v. The King
The Grand Pataphysical Tribunal for the Examination, Prosecution, and Exquisite Unmasking of Grotesque Sovereignty
Docket III: Matter of the Spectacle of Power
Witness: Kathy Wagner Hill
Friday, May 15, 4:00 - 5:00 PM ET
ABOUT THE EVENT
The People v. The King is a nine-part live civic-art broadcast series created and directed by Randall Packer and transmitted from the Zakros Underground Studio Bunker in Washington, DC. Streaming weekly on Fridays from May 1 through July 3, 2026, 4:00 to 5:00 PM ET as the next installment of Bunker Fridays, the series convenes artists, activists, journalists, scholars, policymakers, and other public thinkers to examine power, authority, media, and democratic life as the nation stumbles toward its 250th anniversary.
Docket III: The Matter of the Spectacle of Power begins with Witness Kathy Wagner Hill of the Center for Data Analytics, Policy, and Government, Johns Hopkins University, Washington, DC, who will help frame spectacle as a governing system: the orchestration of image, charisma, scale, ritual, and managed attention. This docket examines how power trains publics to watch rather than answer, transforming civic life into a theater of symbolic display. Through speeches, flags, pageantry, monuments, memorials, media choreography, and the National Mall itself as a monumental backdrop, we will investigate how authority stages itself before the people, and how the people are positioned as spectators to its performance.
Across nine weekly witness interviews and a culminating tribunal performance, The People v. The King unfolds as a public investigation of testimony, evidence gathering, and symbolic prosecution, with online audiences seated as the Public Jury whose live chat, questions, and submissions enter the evidentiary record.
The series asks how democratic life is damaged not only by individual rulers, but by the systems, distortions, and fantasies that make sovereign power imaginable, seductive, and dangerous. At once satirical, philosophical, and politically charged, the project treats kingship not simply as a figure of tyranny, but as a recurring structure of obedience, spectacle, appetite, and excess.
Inspired by Alfred Jarry, the fin-de-siècle French avant-garde provocateur, and his “science of pataphysics,” the series culminates in a grand tribunal in which Père Ubu—the grotesque monarch of Jarry’s infamous 1896 play Ubu Roi—appears on the witness stand as the symbolic subject of prosecution. In the final hearing, French actor Ruben Wolzok will perform as Père Ubu live from Paris-Montmartre, bringing a contemporary French theatrical presence to Jarry’s anarchic sovereign clown as the project’s final defendant and witness.
The People v. The King moves from testimony and interpretation toward indictment and theatrical reckoning, asking what it means to confront grotesque sovereignty in an age of media spectacle, democratic fragility, and political exhaustion.
ABOUT RANDALL PACKER
Randall Packer is Artistic Director of Zakros InterArts and a multimedia artist, composer, writer, and educator whose work since the 1980s has explored the intersection of live performance, interactive media, and networked art. He has taught at the University of California, Berkeley, Maryland Institute College of Art, California Institute of the Arts, and American University. He is co-editor of Multimedia: From Wagner to Virtual Reality, widely used in art schools and universities around the world. His performance and installation work has been presented internationally at venues including ZKM Center for Art and Media in Karlsruhe Germany, the Walker Art Center, the Corcoran Gallery of Art, The Kitchen Art Center in New York City, the San Francisco Opera House, and the Transmediale Festival in Berlin. He lives and works in Washington, DC.
ABOUT Kathy Wagner Hill
Kathy Wagner Hill, Ph.D., teaches full-time in the Center for Data Analytics, Policy, and Government at Johns Hopkins University. She served as Center Director from its founding in 2011 until 2022, where she designed the curriculum, developed degree proposals, and worked with colleagues to launch and implement five of the Center’s master’s degrees. Dr. Hill’s current teaching and research interests focus on Congress, institutional capacity, civics, and the functioning of American democracy—areas central to understanding how public authority is structured, represented, and communicated. Kathy began her career in Washington as a Congressional Fellow with the Office of Technology Assessment, later serving as a policy analyst and project director in that congressional agency’s Oceans and Environment Program. She was also an environmental consultant before joining Johns Hopkins. Her work brings a deep understanding of democratic institutions, public policy, and the civic frameworks through which government presents itself to the public and secures legitimacy.
DOCKETS & WITNESSES FOR THE PROSECUTION
Docket I: Matter of Contested Reality Friday May 1-4:00pm ET, Witness: Andy Shallal, activist and owner of Busboys & Poets, Washington, DC
Docket II: Matter of Voluntary Obedience Friday May 8-4:00pm ET, Witness: Larry Swiader, Chief Digital Officer, American Battlefield Trust, Washington, DC
Docket III: Matter of the Spectacle of Power Friday May 15-4:00pm ET, Kathy Wagner Hill, Center for Data Analytics, Policy, and Government, Johns Hopkins University, Washington, DC
Docket IV: Matter of the Laundering of the Unreality Friday May 22-4:00pm ET, Kaliope, Poetic Muse of the Blurring of the Real and the Virtual
Docket V: Matter of the Intimate Bureaucracy Friday June 5-4:00pm ET, Craig Saper, Professor of the Language, Literacy, and Culture Doctoral Program at UMBC in Baltimore, Maryland, US.
Docket VI: Matter of Imaginary Solutions Friday June 12-4:00pm ET, Linda Klieger Stillman, Alfred Jarry/Pataphysics Scholar and Collector, Potomac, MD
Docket VII: Matter of Necessary Resistance Friday, June 19-4:00pm ET, Sahar Sajadieh, Computational performance/media artist and scholar, Santa Barbara, CA
Docket VIII: Matter of the Belly of the State Friday, June 26-4:00pm ET, Yury Urnov, Visiting Assistant Professor at Towson University, MD, Director of Ubu Roi
Docket IX: Matter of Père Ubu and Grotesque Sovereignty Friday, July 3-4:00pm ET, Ruben Wolzok, The King, Père Ubu, Paris-Montmartre
ABOUT RUBEN WOLZOK
Ruben Wolzok is a French actor working in theater and screen performance in Paris. In 2026 he appears with Compagnie Groucha in Antigone at Théo Théâtre, where he serves as part of the ensemble in Jean Anouilh's drama of authority and revolt. His screen work includes the 2024 short film Jules Coudekouto. In The People v. The King, Wolzok performs Père Ubu from Paris-Montmartre, bringing a contemporary French theatrical presence to Alfred Jarry's grotesque sovereign and serving as the project's final defendant and witness for the prosecution.
ABOUT ALFRED JARRY
Alfred Jarry (8 September 1873 – 1 November 1907) was a French symbolist writer who is best known for his play Ubu Roi (1896), often cited as a forerunner of the Dada, Surrealist, and Futurist movements of the 1920s and 1930s and later the theatre of the absurd in the 1950s and 1960s. He also coined the term and philosophical concept of 'pataphysics, difficult to be simply defined or pinned down, it has been described as the "science of imaginary solutions."
