Postdoctoral research: a forecast



(Click anywere on the text to open the topologic version of the text)


Working Title:

Data Ocean Theatre (D.O.T.)

or Of Waves, Clouds, and Stages                        

 

I could pursue, in the framework of a post-doctoral project, my artistic research around what I have coined the third sceno-temporal turn; this turn, which summons the potential scenic agency that enmeshes together biospheric actors and factors and so-called artificial, algorithm-dependent entities.

 

The post-doctoral project could push the research further concerning the transformations of my scenic practice and thinking from an environmental perspective that takes in the agential expansion of automation (as approached in my doctorate, in the sense that the so-called artificial reality is not exteriority any longer, or some technology out-there to hand, but a milieu and a condition).

 

So far my interest, activated through the dramaturgy and strategy of the erosion of the separation between a revealed human stage and a concealed non-human backstage, has materialized as a work of representation/illustration of this phenomenon of environmental doubling (biospheric + algorithmic). On the occasion of a postdoc, I could challenge the permanence of this representational tendency with another kind of view, that of engaging with works based on designing autopoietic artificial scenic systems (?) through an approach of computational engineering, e.g. coding.

 

In this direction, I could, for example, look more closely into the difference between the notions of artificial and artefactual, in relation to imagination and imaginary (Garcia), and how the distinction might offer scenic alternatives and options for stage structural revision.

 

I could also examine how the theatrical concepts of representation scene and black box have traveled and taken another metaphorical and aesthetic dimension when used in computational and robotic realms of development (with a focus on the paradigm shift from machine-learning to machine-imagining).

 

I could then examine, from and in the practice, how the ongoing general digitization/discretization may affect structurally the notion of stage, beyond the technical and representational use of technology as a tool to use on pre-defined cultural stages, that is to say how the interest in “staging” the complementary encounters of theatre and (multi)media has transformed into a concern about how a stage might be generated by the performance of the technology itself (Leeker).

 

Through an experimental series of works, redoubled by their artistic research expositions and motivated by the continuous endeavor to find new ways/options for theatre and performance via artistic research (and the other way around), I could look more closely into the legacy and the actuality of speculative fiction poetics (including the history of the relations of theatre with science-fiction), that of forward-looking imaginaries about the relational becoming between humans and machines, on a planetary scale, but also from an interplanetary perspective.

 

In this direction, my postdoctoral research could be a platform for the intersection of transdisciplinary practices in current artistic and research movements around the issue of algorithmic drama, intergalactic migrations, terraforming processes, as well as the advances in the other-outer space, that of so-called virtual realities immersive practices (the great indoors).

 

While probing these immersive and so-called artificial environments, the research would continually look at how these artistic and scientific speculations meet the (hyper)dramatic biospheric changes of the planet Earth. In this sense, and building on my doctorate which invoked, from the perspective of directing, theoretical trends such as Actor-Network-Theory, Posthumanism, or Techno-Ecology, the postdoctoral research would re-start poetically from the double metaphor of the Ocean and of the Matrix, and the sub-metaphor of the Wave and the Cloud. It could experiment, from the newly coined notion of environmental intelligence, with how the notion of stage might mutate and reappear within such heterogeneous agential dynamic, made of the simultaneous forces of the transforming biosphere, the growing algorithmic-conditioned life, and the promises of intergalactic futures.

 

Among many still unanswered questions this postdoctoral research could try to consider from the practice:

> How Hyperdramatic Theatre meets post-digital thinking from the concern of rehumanizing technology without turning (by default) back to anthropocentrist, anthropomorphist and rationalist systems of artistic capture?

> How to engage scenically with technology without implanting it as an outside element but to think of it as a structural reontologising agent in and for the emergence of new scenic options?

> How to think about the mutation of the theatre machine(ry) into a machine that imagines theatre autonomously?

> What could an artificial stage be? A datastage (as we can talk already of datasphere or dataverse)? What happens when the dramatic text is replaced by the hyperdramatic coding?

> Have we (who?) become algorithmic puppets? What are the aesthetic and ethical consequences of a shift towards full automation for the production of the stage?

What does the (polysemic) notion of discrete do to scenic practices?

> How do all these questions meet the climatic biospheric environmental agency in the production of a stage that appears under this double-environmental quality, based on interactions between the diverse co-existing ontological strata?

> What kind of hyperdrama form when this double-environment is a site of viral disruptions (elaborating from the contemporary double reality of viruses i.e. biological invaders and computer malware); How can pandemic and cyber-terrorism/activism ecosystem threats be addressed through scenic notions such as tragedy, catastrophe, estrangement, agon, antagonist, demons..., notions that might be transformed in return, generating alternative scenic imaginaries and practices?


Taking into account that the postdoctoral research could be still driven by a core concern about time-specific performance and also by a poetic sense, let us say tragicomic, of failures, glitches, and bugs, and considering that the project, the endeavor, and the scale are too big, too vast, too transtemporal, too alien, too complex and too unknown to generate stable scenographies.


Topologic version (concept/design): Milton Läufer (WriterTools TM)