computer theater · a reading room
Reading Room
The seven parts, the manifesto, a graph of the history and the four lineages. The plays, the chronology and the writing are one page back.
The seven parts
Taken apart, most works of computer theater share the same seven parts.
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01the body
The live performer. Most arguments in the field are about this part. Phelan holds that performance becomes itself by disappearing; Auslander answers that the live was never pure. Stelarc wires his body to the network, Cunningham captures his dancers' motion, and somatic browser pieces use the reader's body as input.
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02the apparatus
The machinery. Piscator used projectors and treadmills, Brecht left the lights exposed, Svoboda built Laterna Magika, Lepage built the Machine at the Met. Computer theater keeps this habit of showing the rig instead of hiding it.
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03the screen
The screen arrived in two stages. First it was brought onto the stage: the Wooster Group's monitors, Castorf's backstage cameras, Mitchell's live cinema. Then it became the stage: net.art in the browser, desktop performance, a personal computer shared with an audience.
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04the code
Dorsen's chatbots rebuild a debate every night, live coders project their screens so the audience can read the code as it is written, and generative text means no two performances are identical. “Algorithms are thoughts,” says the TOPLAP draft.
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05the network
The network. Ascott theorized it, Galloway and Rabinowitz opened a satellite window between two sidewalks, Sermon put two remote people on the same bed over ISDN, Stelarc let ping traffic twitch his muscles. These works use the network's distance and delay instead of hiding them.
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06the audience
Brecht wanted radio to be two-way. Blast Theory makes the audience players. In browser pieces, the visitor's input drives the work. Computer theater tends to give the audience something to do.
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07the archive
Recording and memory have been onstage since Krapp's tape recorder in 1958. The field keeps arguing about what survives a performance: documentation, reconstruction, Phelan's disappearance. Trained models raise the question again, since a model is an archive of the bodies in its training data.
Missing someone? say so.
A manifesto for computer theater
the body will be present.
the body will continue to be present.
the body cannot be removed, even as the digital takes over, even as the mind begins its upload.
the body is the new virus.
the body is the oldest virus.
the body continues to be more dangerous than the screen.
the body is here because the body is what we are.
the body as invasion. the body as contamination.
the body as vessel.
the body as original algorithm.
the body as the most addictive algorithm.
the body as the ultimate provocation of the mirror neuron.
the body as gift and trick, wisdom and fool.
the body as instantiation, high precision.
the making real of dreams and fantasies.
the body as promise. the body as proof of work.
even if the body disappears, the desire for the body will sit in the substrate of every model built after us.
even if the models forget, the body continues as an echo.
the body as ultimate romanticism. the body as ultimate classicism.
the body as end-all, be-all.
the body is here. the body isn't going anywhere.
The graph
Every point in the index below sits on this graph, with the lines between them. Click a point to open its card, or drag it to move it.
Work in progress. This graph is incomplete and will keep growing. Missing someone? say so.
Four histories
Four lineages feed the form. Every point on the graph above is here as text too, tagged by the history it belongs to and ordered by date within each one.
- 01 breaking the form
- 02 bodies & networks
- 03 screens onstage
- 04 the screen as stage
the origin
01 breaking the form
02 bodies & networks
03 screens onstage
04 the screen as stage
the writings
adjacent