Grief machines: Transhumanist theatre, digital performance, pandemic time

Walsh, Fintan (2021) Grief machines: Transhumanist theatre, digital performance, pandemic time. Theatre Journal 73 (3), pp. 391-407. ISSN 1086-332X.

Abstract

This essay examines some of the ways in which mediatized theatre has grieved for live performance during the coronavirus pandemic, with the mourning of live arts, shared physical experience, and human life intertwined. Focusing on Dead Centre's production To Be a Machine (Version 1.0), which was originally presented as part of Dublin Theatre Festival in 2020, it considers the relationship between theatrical performance mediatized to screens in our largely quarantined domestic spaces and the everyday scenes of living and dying, longing and grieving, which also became abruptly confined to the same surfaces. Focusing on a digital dramaturgy of disembodied heads, the essay explores how grief plays out in anxieties of bodily loss, fragmentation, and dematerialization, and how these concerns have deeper roots in histories of digital culture, AI-enhanced technology and artistic responses, and turn of the twentieth-century stage experimentation. The essay ultimately argues that mediatized theatre not only replicates and reinforces some of the more difficult deprivations of pandemic time, which are prefigured in some of modernity's concerns, but in responding reflexively and reflecting critically on those same conditions, it can offer some strategies for navigating the borders between departed and emergent ways of living and performing.

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