Theory and Contexts: Ontologies of Online Theatre
Facts and Fallacies of Cyberspatial Theatre

Online technologies call received ideas about the nature of
theatre into question. Once the computer becomes an agent of
performative action and creation, there is a distinct blurring of what
was formerly termed, for example, communication, scriptwriting, acting,
visual art, science, design, theatre, video, and performance art. Finite
distinctions apply less and less or, as John Reaves contests, they
collapse altogether:
In the digital world you cannot distinguish different disciplines
by the physical nature of the media or by which work is created
Theater has always been an integrative, collaborative art which
potentially (and sometimes actually) includes all art: music, dance,
painting, sculpture, etc. Why not be aggressive in the tumultuous
context of the Digital Revolution? Why not claim all interactive art in
the name of theater?
(1995: 5)

Online
theatre is rationalised by many as being already ubiquitous, embracing
multiple communicational and presentational aspects of electronic
everyday life. Theatre is not only created by those who consciously use
computer networks for theatrical events, but also millions of 'ordinary'
individuals who use MOOs (see below) and chatrooms, or create home
pages on the World Wide Web. Many home pages constitute digital
palimpsests of Erving Goffman's notions of performative presentations of
the self: the subject progressively erased, redefined and reinscribed
as performance within a pixelated computer proscenium. Personas are
honed as characters for the new theatrical confession-box. Like
postmodern performance artists, individuals explore their
autobiographies and enact intimate dialogues with their inner selves.
Seduced by the apparent intimacy and privacy of this most public of
spaces, they confess all online and reveal secrets to strangers that
they have never told their closest friends (Murray 1997: 99).
The World Wide Web is a site of therapeutic catharsis-overload, and
constitutes the largest theatre in the world, offering everyone fifteen
megabytes of fame.

The
breadth of activities encompassing online 'theatre' has also prompted
new ways of thinking about the effects of virtual technologies on
concepts of identity and subjectivity. In the social and game-playing
environments of MUDs (Multi-user dungeons/dimensions) and MOOs
(object-orientated MUDs), users create Stanislavskian character
biographies, logging-on with a textual description of their physical and
psychological attributes. They carefully and consciously establish
themselves as fictional beings: putting on 'masks', often crossing
gender, and engaging in improvisational performances. Using the Internet
in both a social and performative manner, the construction and
representation of identity becomes multiple and hybrid, 'continuous but
plural' (J. and M. Ito 1996: 80). There is
intense identification with the assumed personas beyond even
Strasburgian 'method'; to the point where many players consider their
online identities to be more 'authentic' than those they present in RL
(real life). RL becomes theorised as just one of many parallel windows
which makes up the newly networked human ontology, with the adoption of
hybrid personas a route to spiritual understanding and personal
transformation (Turkle 1997). This notion is
linked to prevalent but fallacious discourses on cyberspatial
disembodiment and attendant visions of liberation from the flesh. As
Michelle Kendrick points out, even within abstracted territories,
notions of subjectivity are always inescapably embodied: "The bodiless
entity that hypothetically exists in cyberspace depends, in myriad ways,
on the referent of the corporeal body in front of the computer"(1996: 152).

Discourses on performed fictional identity have become the
emperor's new clothes; misreading improvisational role-plays as seismic
cultural and socio-aesthetic shifts:
The Network creates new relationships between being fictive
and being real(ized). Being fictive becomes seen as an integral part of
being real ... Fiction will deepen so that one may fall in and never
emerge ... We may see a retribalization of social structures through new
fictive forms and spaces
Our online identities may become more
important to us than our "real life" (RL) identities. Fictive VR may
become more useful than personal RL. (Renan 1996: 62 - 69)
Such views are common currency within psychological theories on
cyberspace, and have been uncritically adopted and assimilated within
performance studies. But, as I have argued elsewhere (Dixon, 1999),
the rhetoric is fanciful and hyperbolic, reconfiguring the age-old
acting practice of adopting a character into some mystical life-changing
experience heralding a brave new world. Whilst one might relate the
effects of role-playing MUDs and MOOs to positive therapeutic aspects of
participation in theatre or dramatherapy, the visions of
cybernetically-transformed beings living in digitally-harmonised
societies are mythologies. Such utopian cyber-prophesies confuse and
conflate the metaphorical with the actual, and fail to recognise that
cyberspace merely offers an alternative space in which to re-rehearse
the always-already divided, fragmented and plural self. Rather than the
Gibsonian notion of 'consensual hallucination', cyberspace has instead
become "a consensual clich้, a dumping ground for repackaged
philosophies about space, subjectivity, and culture" (Markley 1996: 56).
Whither (Wither) the body(less)?

In
contemporary cultural and cybercultural theories, the body has been
increasingly conceptualised as an object divorced from the mind, and
emerging discourses on the virtual body and 'disembodiment' reinforce
and extend the Cartesian split. The bifurcatory division between body
and mind has lead to an objectified redefinition of the human subject -
the 'person' - into an abstracted, depersonalised and increasingly
dehumanised physical object. But, as Johannes Birringer (1998)
has noted, the human body is not a concept. Bodies are particular, not
general. Bodies are not animated cadavers, despite Stelarc's
protestations. Bodies embody consciousness; to talk of disembodied
consciousness is a contradiction in terms.
A key problem in understanding and conceptualising the virtual
performing body is the dualistic distinction between information and
matter. The mapping of the body into a computational environment is
generally assumed to render it disembodied informational data, rather
than embodied material flesh. But this position is now rightly being
challenged by writers such as Jay Bolter and Richard Grusin who assert,
for example, that if one considers that the self is expressed in email
communication, it does not mean that the self is disembodied,
but that it is embodied in a particularly mediated form
the
same is true of all mediated expressions of the networked self: the self
that participates in a video conference is embodied as a video and
audio image
the self that surfs the net is embodied in its IP address,
its web browser, and its plug-ins (2000: 234).

In relation to digital manifestations of experimental theatre,
dance and performance, I would suggest that, when animated in
performative action, the virtual human body (as opposed to a computer
simulated body) is still perceived by viewers empathetically as
always-already embodied material flesh. This perception is shared by the
performer, whose actions in creating recordings or images for
manifestations of their virtual body are fully embodied actions of body
and mind. The computer monitor, rather than representing a Lacanian
mirror of misrecognition, operates as an identificatory mirror of
empathetic human recognition. Contrary to prevalent critical
assumptions, I do not believe the performing virtual body is either less
authentic than the live, nor is it disembodied from the performer. What
possible use is disembodiment to a performer? Or the very idea of a
mind and body split?
The fundamental goal of the performer is the eradication of
distinction between mind and body - the fluid and unmediated bridge
between the inner and the outer - mental or emotional impulse
spontaneously combusting as unique and pure physical expression (Grotowski 1968).
Regardless of the medium, performance artists explicitly explore and
enact their holistic autonomies and interiorities (gendered, spiritual,
emotional and political), not simply their bodily corporeality. If this
process takes place within a recorded digital or electronic environment,
it is the medium that is virtual, unreal or disembodied, not the human
performer within it. In the performance arts, whether in a theatre, on a
street corner, or a computer monitor, the medium is not the message
(and never has been), the performer is.
For this reason, I interpret Peggy Phelan's oft-cited argument (1992)
that performance is characterised by live presence in a constant state
of disappearance as more a statement of her preferred medium of
performance rather than a cogent ontological theory. Performance's
ontology must surely centre on the performer, not on liveness -
particularly in an age when performers are increasingly 'embodied'
within electronic and virtual technologies. The ontology (and
aesthetics) of disappearance has been discussed extensively by Paul
Virilio (1991) in relation to recorded media and
has also been adopted by Peter Lunenfeld. He has argued the
distinctiveness and uniqueness of networked digital media, seeing its
interactive ontology as fundamentally different from television or film (1999: xix).
He suggests that the continually evolving technologies and the built-in
obsolescence of hardware and software systems means that we should
"embrace their mercurial qualities and conceptualize them as being
somehow evanescent, like theatrical performances or dance recitals" (xx).
The Posthuman Body and Mind

Cyberneticist Gregory Bateson has posed the question of whether a blind man's stick is part of the man (in Hayles 1999: 84).
In epidermal biological terms it is not, but as far as cybernetic
systems are concerned it is, as is a hearing aid, or Steven Hawking's
voice synthesiser, since it constitutes part of a single information
flow and feedback system. If we accept this premise, then the digital
manifestations of performers working telematically are also part of the
performer's bodies.
But to fully embrace such radical theory may also involve
accepting the proposition that one has become 'posthuman'. Posthuman
theory places 'emphasis on cognition rather than embodiment' (Hayles 1999: 5)
towards the amalgam of human consciousness and intelligent machine,
with the body becoming a manipulable evolutionary prosthesis, as can be
seen, for example, in the work of Stelarc (1999).
Katherine Hayles stresses that becoming posthuman is not
contingent upon technological components or implants in the body as in
the literal cyborg, but on the construction of subjectivity and
informational processes. 'People become posthuman when they think they
are posthuman' she says (6). If we accept this premise, we may need to acknowledge that 'Digital Performance' is predominantly created by people who are (or believe themselves to be) posthuman for people who are posthuman.
Within the cybernetic model, the problem of the body and
embodiment is short-circuited if not erased since it is considered that:
information has lost its body
to be conceptualised as an entity
separate from the material forms in which it is thought to be embedded
In the posthuman, there are no essential differences or absolute
demarcations between bodily existence and computer simulation,
cybernetic mechanism and biological organism, robot teleology and human
goals (2 - 3).

In cybernetic information and communication theory, embodiment is
therefore immaterial, and according to Hayles is defined by pattern
rather than presence. If this is the case, and if questions of absence
and presence are not relevant to information and communication within
cybernetic discourse, should they be any more relevant to digital
manifestations of performance? In a postmodern age when Foucault and
others have already conceptualised the body as a primarily linguistic
discourse system, does the intervention of mediating technologies alter
the chain of bodily information and communication production in
performance?
Theatre has always been the will to virtuality. Theatre has
always been a 'virtual reality' where actors imaginatively conspire with
audiences to conjure a belief (otherwise known as a 'suspension of
disbelief') that a bare stage is in fact a Danish castle, or an eleventh
century Scottish battlefield. The transformation of the human body has
always been quintessential to performance: by external (costume, makeup,
lighting) and internal means (physical and psychological
characterisation). The notion of the 'real' has never sat happily within
theatre, notwithstanding realist theatre's concern for verisimilitude.
Performance is always-already a simulation. It stands for something
outside of itself. Theatre is the inauthentic masquerading as the
authentic; the unreal posited as the real.

This basic paradigm is the same as in virtual systems, as Brenda Laurel (1991)
has discussed extensively, drawing parallels between the virtual worlds
of theatres and computers. Mark Poster has observed that: "Virtual
reality systems continue the Western trend of duplicating the real by
means of technology. They provide the participant with a second-order
reality" (1999: 42). I would suggest that this
second-order reality corresponds to exactly what goes on in theatre
production, which similarly makes use of technology to simulate the
real. What binds theatre in both live and virtual forms is the presence,
whether live or electronic, of the empathetic human body and the
exploration of the symbolic and the unreal. As Matthew Causey has
observed: "the sublimity of performance and art within the theater lies
in their capacity, as Lyotard theorized it, 'to put forward the
unpresentable in presentation itself'" (1999: 198).
For me, postmodernism is the explanation of how society has
become consumed by mass media. We are becoming the media. The posthuman
notion extends this until we are media. That we can now conceive that
live and mediatised bodies are the same is because we have (or will
have) succeeded in 'taking away' the technology, since we no longer give
it a thought. It is part of us. Posthuman theories, extending McLuhan's
concept of mediatised consciousness and Baudrillard's ideas of
simulation and simulacra, suggest that there is no reason why we should
recognise breathing, living bodies to have greater solidity and
authenticity than electronic humans similarly engaged in performative
actions. As performers increasingly virtualise and posthumanise
themselves in digital manifestations, they too believe in, and are
reliant upon this erasure of difference between live, recorded,
physically present or telematically transmitted embodiments.

References
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