TOWARDS AN AESTHETICS OF THEATRE TECHNOLOGY unpublished PhD (original) (raw)
Related papers
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Digital Creativity, 1999
The computer has already become an essential tool both in the professional theatre and in the academic world. This paper gives an overview of the ways in which technology can influence theatre and theatre research practices, dealing both with those technologies which are currently in use and those which the future might hold. The fundamental conclusion is that any move towards reducing the spontaneity of what takes place on stage and the sense of community which takes place in the theatre, thereby creating a more rigid, universalised or solitary experience, seriously threatens the integrity, and also the point, of the live theatre experience.
The Impact of Digital Media on Contemporary Performance
This thesis investigates artworks born at the convergence of digital media and contemporary performance, and the ways in which technology impacts the field of performance. The term digital media refers to technology that produces digitised (as opposed to analogue) content such as text, audio, video, graphics and metadata. Contemporary performance refers to artworks that combine different artistic traditions—experimental theatre and dance, video art, visual art, music composition and performance art—in a single performance event. The convergence of these two fields has produced a significant body of technological works of art that challenge and reconfigure traditional conventions in contemporary performance. This thesis examines the impact of digital media on the ways performance is created, received and experienced, and the extent to which media open up new possibilities for creative expression and may generate new art forms. I mapped the field by defining three large categories that mark the heterogeneous landscape of technologically enhanced performances today, namely multimedia theatre, telematic performance and pervasive performance. Methodologically, I combined hermeneutic methods of interpretation and reflection with academic forms of practical inquiry, combining textual analysis of relevant works from each of the three categories—such as Ghost Road (Murgia and Pauwels 2012), make-shift (Jamieson and Crutchlow 2010) and Rider Spoke (Blast Theory 2007)—with the practical development and analysis of a pervasive performance experiment titled Chain Reaction (Pérez 2009 and 2011). Theoretically, the project is interdisciplinary, bringing together performance theory, digital media studies, experimental game scholarship and experiential art documentation. In discussing the ways in which digital media impact contemporary performance, I identify a number of traditional conventions in the field of theatre and performance that are currently being challenged. These are in the areas of audience participation, use of space, actor role, rehearsal and staging, and performance documentation. Central arguments in the thesis are, on the one hand, that researchers, critics and practitioners must look beyond the visionary expressions of aesthetic potential in order to grasp the real state of technologically enhanced art forms. On the on the other hand, it is only by considering both, the horizon-pushing high-tech along with the purpose-orientated low-tech, that a more grounded understanding of the present impact of developing technology on art culture can and should be reached.
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Our speech will present the theoretical approach to the problems of body and technology in stage performance. The starting point will be status of the categories such as presence, ephemerality, immediacy of the (theatre) performance radically undermined in the texts of performance studies scholars such as Rebecca Schneider, Amelia Jones or Philip Auslander. Utilizing examples of performances from young Polish theatre: Krzysztof Garbaczewski (b.1983) and Radosław Rychcik (b.1981), we would like to juxtapose two of functioning models of body-technology relation on stage. The first one – represented by Garbaczewski – is based on understanding of the body as always mediated. It multiplies (undermines) body’s presence by use of audiovisual means. The second one – Rychcik’s case – is to push the theatrical presence of the body to absolute maximum. In this case audiovisual layer is used to build a strong opposition to the actor’s stage presence. The two examples will be used to propose new theoretical approach. We would like to show that such stage phenomena are not only the sign of the (technological) reality changing but also a very important, theoretical input in the understanding of the theatre as such. We will state that every single body on stage (no matter if consciously like in Garbaczewski’s case, or unconsciously like in the Rychcik’s case) is already mediated and the use of technological tools is a way to play with this specific character of theatre corporeality. This broader perspective will also incorporate elements of the political dimension of annexing media-mediated and media-manipulated corporeality, for it will follow the apparently transparent and natural dimension of such actions, whereby once again it will turn, as postulated by Jacques Rancière, aesthetic considerations into political considerations, which would be the speech final point.
Skenè. Journal of Theatre and Drama Studies, 2021
As digital design increasingly inscribes its own narrative from the outset of the rehearsal process, twenty-first century theatre artists and audiences are becoming more and more accustomed to porous dramaturgies, influenced by information technologies and digital articulations. This article explores the use of technology in contemporary performance by interrogating the diverse functions of the multimedia element by touching on a number of theoretical and practice-related issues: How has technology affected performance both in terms of creative strategies and audience experience? What are some of the pleasures and dangers involved in the omni-presence of the media in today’s theatre landscape? How has digital articulation enhanced, ironized or redefined structure and characterization? Under what conditions can the encounter of corporeal presence with an electronically interceded image provide meaningful experiences for the audience? Bringing in examples from different multimedia productions, I will try to illustrate a work method of compositional dramaturgy, where the philosophy that structures the mise-en-scène draws from the visual as well as ontological collision between the live and the mediated.
Editorial Comment: Digital Media and Performance, Theatre Journal 61.4 (2009): 1-3
As Steve Dixon has observed in his influential book Digital Performance, 1 which is cited frequently in this issue of Theatre Journal, the 1990s represented a high-water mark in digital performance. That decade saw an explosion of innovation and euphoria surrounding the use of digital technologies-video projections, MIDI-triggered images and audio, sensors, telematics-in live performance events and performative installation art.
Theatre, performance and analogue technology: historical interfaces and intermedialities
Studies in Theatre and Performance, 2014
Books included in this cutting-edge series centre on global and embodied approaches to performance and technology. As well as focussing on digital performance and art, books in the series also include the theoretical and historical context relevant to these practices. The series offers fresh artistic and theoretical perspectives on this exciting and growing area of contemporary performance practice, and includes contributors from a wide range of international locations working within this varied discipline. Titles in the series will include edited collections and monographs on issues including (but not limited to): identity and live art; intimacy and engagement with technology; biotechnology and artistic practices; technology, architecture and performance; performance, gender and technology; and space and performance.
Theatre, Performance and Analogue Technology
2013
Books included in this cutting-edge series centre on global and embodied approaches to performance and technology. As well as focussing on digital performance and art, books in the series also include the theoretical and historical context relevant to these practices. The series offers fresh artistic and theoretical perspectives on this exciting and growing area of contemporary performance practice, and includes contributors from a wide range of international locations working within this varied discipline. Titles in the series will include edited collections and monographs on issues including (but not limited to): identity and live art; intimacy and engagement with technology; biotechnology and artistic practices; technology, architecture and performance; performance, gender and technology; and space and performance.
Digital cultures are performative cultures. This assumption is illustrated by the ubiquitous and invisible infrastructures that constitute them, which are interstratified by so-called ‘smart things’, creating a socio-technical environment, in which performances of the technological come about. The digital performs, the human reacts to the agency the technologies suggest, and vice versa: “Performing (the) Digital”. There is a considerable genealogical background to this assumption, which needs to be reconstructed. It is founded within a ‘discourse history of performativity’, which has been taking place across scientific disciplines concerning technology and the humanities since the 1950s. How then can performative methods engage with these cultures on a critical level? Methods and epistemology of socalled artistic research may hold an answer to this question.
Revue d’Historiographie du Théâtre 4. Special Issue: Études théâtrales et humanités numériques, 2017
After a critical presentation of the state of the art in scholarly activities at the intersection of theatre and digital humanities, in Canada and elsewhere, this paper suggests how the two disciplines might work together to articulate and facilitate new modalities of knowledge production emerging in each individually. Its aim is to make explicit the values of the inventive knowledge production characteristic of design and performance, and to propose that theatre and digital humanities might best acknowledge and enable inventive knowledge by shifting their emphasis away from production-oriented prototyping and towards experimental prototyping, provotyping, and experience design. Du développement des outils au design expérimental Jusqu'à présent, les chercheurs travaillant à l'intersection des études théâtrales et des humanités numériques ont eu tendance à se lancer dans le développement d'outils électroniques, conçus pour faciliter deux grands modes de création de savoirs: à travers des recherches sur l'histoire du théâtre (y compris la numérisation et l'archivage de textes ou de traces de représentations), ou à travers l'aide à la création théâtrale (à savoir la facilitation et la documentation des processus de création). Dans les deux branches d'activité, l'accent a été mis sur le développement d'outils prêts à l'emploi, ou de prototypes prêts pour la mise en production, susceptibles d'être disséminés largement et appliqués à des contextes variés par toute sorte d'utilisateurs, avec leurs objectifs spécifiques. Dans d'autres mots, la recherche à l'intersection du théâtre et des humanités numériques a été orientée par la création de produits et de plateformes ; nous avons imité les entreprises commerciales de production de software avec notre ambition de créer des objets numériques qui puissent aider d'autres chercheurs à générer ou à transmettre des savoirs. Quoique les outils qui en ont résulté, ainsi que notre engagement critique avec leurs épistémologiques, ont été une réussite (au Canada, ils se comptent parmi les plus notables dans le champ des humanités numériques), les objectifs et les méthodes qui ont porté ce travail ont eu relativement peu d'impact sur les buts et les méthodes, établis ou émergents, soit des humanités numériques, soit des études théâtrales comme disciplines indépendantes. En me fondant sur les projets que je connais le mieux – principalement des projets canadiens dans les humanités numériques et mon propre Simulated Environment for Theatre (SET)-, je souhaite soutenir ici que les humanités numériques ont à offrir plus aux études théâtrales, et réciproquement. L'idée principale de cet article est que les réussites du projet SET, qui a su répondre aux tendances dominantes dans son domaine, sont moins intéressantes que les possibilités suggérées par ses échecs et ses à côtés, surtout dans le champ de la construction du savoir et des objets d'étude. Le théâtre et les humanités numériques pourraient aller plus loin et tirer plus de profit en mettant moins l'accent sur le prototypage orienté vers la production, et en se consacrant plus à un prototypage expérimental ou au « provotypage », pour faire plus de place, dans un champ dominé par des méthodes de recherche issues des sciences sociales ou des sciences exactes, à des méthodes plus propres aux sciences humaines et susceptibles créer, sans exclusive, des savoirs