Moderator: Fraser Steven
Location: Room 443 (Room C)
In-Person Session
“Twenty-two. Copypasta is meant to ruin every last bit of originality. Twenty-three. Copypasta is meant to ruin every last bit of originality”: tracing the technology of posthuman opposition through Royal Court dramaturgy
In his forward to Tim Price’s Teh Internet is Serious Business, convicted hacker, Jake Davis, says that “With this play, we can all perhaps hope to understand, at least a little bit, what the internet means” (xii). Should we take these words seriously coming from a hacker convicted of hacking major websites and defacing the websites of national governments? I argue in this paper that the internet can serve as a cypher for a technologization, that is the casting as technology, of human and non human identities. I will do this by exploring the ways in which plays at the Royal Court Theatre have staged the problem of the internet as well as the posthuman bodies who oppose their own casting as technology.
Tracing the internet on the Royal Court stage through Price’s depiction of the now nearly ancient internet of the early aughts in Teh Internet is Serious Business, Jennifer Haley’s metaverse in The Nether, and Jasmine Lee-Jones’ Seven Methods of Killing Kylie Jenner, which takes place in large part on Twitter, I will explore the way that posthuman subjects such as children, animals, and nature are rendered as technologies meant to perpetuate an extractivist capitalist state of affairs. Using Mel Y Chen’s theory of animacies I will trace the ways in which posthuman subjects are rendered as technology through the various representations of the internet and in various palimpsestuous natures on stage. I will argue that posthuman subjects nevertheless resist this state of affairs through their own mattering.
Caitlin Gowans, University of Toronto
Caitlin Gowans is a PhD Candidate at the University of Toronto’s Centre for Drama, Theatre and Performance Studies. Her research is on posthuman resistance in dramaturgy at the Royal Court Theatre in London, UK.
Shifts in Agency: The Performative Dynamics of Body-Technology Relations
Observing the proliferation of agentic technology in the theatre, in 2015, Jennifer Parker-Starbuck noted that “all technology is now always-already subject” (67). In this paper, I begin by building on Parker-Starbuck’s taxonomy of cyborg theatre, to note that in the post-pandemic context, the body is now always-already abject. That is to say, the body is now, by default, a virtual, unstable, or even absent body—something between object and subject. Using Parker-Starbuck’s vocabulary, I combine insights from Martina Leeker and Maurya Wickstrom to develop a theoretical framework that highlights the moment-to-moment interplay between bodies and technologies on stage. Agency of different types is assigned by and between human bodies and technologies, through linguistic and technological performatives, on a moment-to-moment basis, and these shifts are enmeshed in the process of commodification.
To illustrate the dramaturgical significance of this framework, I revisit two past performances that I helped to develop: my own Discord-based cyber theatrical project Blink and Squint: The Missing Colours (2021) and Toasterlab’s hybrid VR-based Edinburgh Fringe show, Aionos (2023). Both of these projects involved the agentic interplay between on-stage bodies and technologies, and were never fully completed. I hypothesize that these projects could benefit from my framework, which would allow for a shared vocabulary that helps to direct and articulate artistic intentions in a devised theatre context.
Works Cited
Parker-Starbuck, Jennifer. “Cyborg Returns: Always-Already Subject Technologies.” Performance and Media, edited by Sarah Bay-Cheng et al., University of Michigan Press, 2015, p. 67, doi.org/10.3998/mpub.5582757.
Tyler Graham, York University
Tyler Graham is a Ph. D. student and theatre artist at York University whose work occurs at the intersection of dialectical theatre and intermedial performance. Much of his artistic work has revolved around online “cyber theatre” and virtual reality performance. He presented at VRTO with VR performance artist Ari Tarr.