Virtual Theatres: An Introduction

Gabriella Giannachi, Virtual Theatres: An Introduction (London & New York: Routledge, 2004) In 2003 at the Performance Studies International conference, news was just to hand that the US Federal government had seized property and subpoenaed Steve Kurtz, one of the members of the Critical Arts Ensemble. After the sudden death of his wife, Kurtz's work as a bioartist had come under scrutiny and was regarded as a threat to government and corporate interests. His art practice mimics, experiments with and comments upon the manipulation of biogenctic materials that has become part of the privatised and corporatised sphere of scientific research. This case, in its extreme legal and political form, exemplifies the thesis of Gabriella Giannachi's succinct study of Virtual Theatres that the virtual inflects the real, and is intextricably close to the real, even being mistaken for the real. But the virtual also transforms and intensifies the effects of the real, so that it enables the viewer to see from within how the production of the real is taking place. This intimacy of the virtual with the real raises, as she points out, ethical and political questions but it also does so in the realm of art, through a remaking of aesthetic possibilities. In the introduction Giannachi establishes some key characteristics of the virtual, as they have been theorised during the last thirty years or more. Her central claim is that the virtual is a form of remediation, it is both 'about media' and an extension of mediated forms and functions by being ontologically intermedial and metamedial. While more conventional theatrical frames and realities position the viewer outside the production of illusion, the virtual requires the viewer to enter the simulated reality space, to become immersed in the production of both its meaning and form. In this sense, it is always a performance, subject to both disappearance (as Phelan defines the performative) and to its appearance (its repetitive production as a beginning for new events or interactions). The viewer as participant may interact with a screen, through a series of relatively limited modes of connection, or other machinic extensions that serve as prosthetics of the human body and, in reverse, the human becomes a prosthetics of the machine, a source of data or simulated movement. The ways in which the extended body becomes merged with the interface of the virtual provides the site of play for many of the works discussed. Once the performer-viewer is hooked up or inside the virtual, then they find themselves in newly fashioned environments through the telepresence of the internet or live-streaming, or in a virtual space in which simulated avatars and simulated environments interact. In the remediated world of virtual reality, according to Giannachi, there is a merging of the information society, the world that receives and processes messages from new technologies, and the world of flesh and blood, that is what remains of organic reality. Virtual theatres render visible the differences between the virtual and the real without asserting however, unless you believe Baudrillard literally, that one has replaced the other. But they cannot be separated since the real is already itself recreated and remediated by the virtual. For the relative initiate to this field, Virtual Theatres provides invaluable definitions for the new and essential lexicon of MUDS and MOOs, holopoelry, genart, telematics, knowbotics, QTVR, cyberpunk etc. etc. Moreover each chapter provides a detailed discussion of the layers through which virtual theatre might be approached: hypertextualities, cyborg theatre, the (re)crealion of nature, performing through the hypersurfacc and the aesthetic domain of VR. Key theorists, such as Baudillard, Virilio, Hayles, Haraway, Benedict, Cavallaro, Deleuze, are stitched into the discussion at the beginning of each chapter without making them the focus. In this field there is however a fascinating symbiosis between those that produce theory and those that write about their own work, in much of the literature the artist leads the theorist and produces the discourse. …