I'm (not) there: co-presence in a postdigital culture

The title of Florian Cramer and Petar Jandrić's 2021 article ‘Postdigital: A Term That Sucks but Is Useful’ humorously acknowledges the terminological challenges surrounding this term,Footnote ¹⁴ with Cramer defining it as ‘a perspective that finds the distinction between “digital” and “non-digital” to be less clear than it seems when it is rigorously inspected, and also less useful and relevant than it often seems’.Footnote ¹⁵ The most noteworthy part of this passage for the present context is Cramer's statement that it may not only be difficult to delineate strict demarcations between the ‘digital’ and the ‘non-digital’ in the current media landscape and the omnipresent mediatization of everyday life, but, in fact, that such a differentiation may not be particularly ‘useful’ or ‘relevant’. In a 2016 article on ‘Postmedia Performance’, published as an ‘Intervention’ in the Contemporary Theatre Review, Sarah Bay-Cheng indeed posits that ‘it is time to acknowledged [sic] that we may have entered a moment of “postmedia”’, arguing that

Bay-Cheng's notion of ‘postmedia’ offers a convincing way of addressing the increasing mediatization both of theatre and of everyday life in the twenty-first century, and further reinforces the idea that the boundaries between media have become porous, existing in a constant process of oscillation and (re)negotiation. While in Dead Centre's adaptation of To Be a Machine 1.0,Footnote ¹⁷ a certain awareness of media-specificity is necessary in order for the playful and self-reflexive commentary to ‘land’ with the audience, the boundaries between the virtual and the real, the organic and the inorganic, become increasingly blurred throughout the performance, for example when Mark discusses uploading one's consciousness to the cloud or likens ‘human existence’ to a ‘suboptimal system’.Footnote ¹⁸

The ‘supplementary logic of opposing media ontologies’ is similarly challenged in Causey's understanding of the postdigital, which does not equal a wholesale rejection of the digital but rather contests the ‘binary distinctions among media delivery systems’ in earlier accounts of the ‘ontology of performance’.Footnote ¹⁹ The central formulation of a ‘postdigital culture’ according to Causey is ‘that of a social system fully familiarized and embedded in electronic communications and virtual representations, wherein the biological and the mechanical, the virtual and the real, and the organic and the inorganic approach indistinction’.Footnote ²⁰ With the digital becoming the standard – or in some cases, only possible – form not only of theatre but of communication more widely during the COVID-19-related lockdowns, the notion of ‘postdigital’ as a term that blurs the boundaries between physical reality and technological simulation has gained renewed traction, one that Causey and other early theorists of the term could hardly have predicted at the time.

To Be a Machine 1.0 engages with all seven components or modalities that Causey considers crucial to postdigital performance – ‘asynchronous time registers and multidimensional spatial configurations’, ‘replication and simulation rather than traditional representational models’, ‘networked interconnectivity and the transmedial’, ‘bugs and glitches’, ‘trans-identities’, ‘the reality of the virtual’, ‘copy and paste’Footnote ²¹ – to different degrees. In the context of co-presence, the first two aspects are particularly pertinent to the discussion, as well as ‘the reality of the virtual’, which is understood as a challenging of the ‘binaries of the biological and the virtual, the organic and the inorganic, the machine and the flesh’.Footnote ²² In the following, the article explores how the aspects of ‘postdigital co-presence’ identified above – the blurring of the ontological planes between the digital and the physical, real-time interaction with the remote audience and strategies aimed at increasing their affective engagement – are implemented in Dead Centre's To Be a Machine 1.0.

To be (or not to be) a machine

Arguing that ‘internet theatre created during the pandemic functions as a metonym for the transformation of the human subject from corporeal flesh to bio-techno hybrids’,Footnote ²³ Joseph Dunne-Howrie notes a ‘decentring of biological corporeality in Internet theatre as the primary mode of human connection’ in recent discussions surrounding liveness in (post-)pandemic performances.Footnote ²⁴ Heidi Liedke and Monika Pietrzak-Franger similarly note that ‘physical copresence at performances is no longer crucial to th[e] new sense of liveness’ developed in the wake of COVID-19 restrictions,Footnote ²⁵ with a ‘sense of a virtual community’ becoming a central feature of ‘viral theatre’.Footnote ²⁶ In the case of To Be a Machine 1.0, this view is corroborated (among other things) by promotional material relating to the performance: the tagline of the (electronic) programme – ‘Thank you for not coming’Footnote ²⁷ – encapsulates the blurring of the boundaries between physical and virtual co-presence. In an almost Schrödingerian sense, the audience is, indeed, both present and not present at the same time during this performance: present in the sense of watching the performance remotely in real time via Vimeo and as a simulacrum in the physical auditorium, not present in the sense that the audience's bodies are not in the same physical space as that of the performer. Fuchs suggests that To Be a Machine 1.0 thus ‘puts pressure on the notion of theater as an embodied event, one that requires performer and audience to share a space’.Footnote ²⁸

In the case of To Be a Machine 1.0, questions of presence became pertinent even before the start of the show, as audience members were asked to record videos of themselves and upload them in exchange for the streaming link, a process guided by actor Jack Gleeson, who performed the role of Mark in the play. This process led to a conflation of different temporalities as well as spatialities, with a future reaction being pre-recorded at a given moment and later staged in the present as an affective memory of the past. In this, it embodied a sense of ‘asynchronous time registers and multidimensional spatial configurations’, which Causey identifies as a central feature of postdigital performance. During the performance, the ontological boundaries surrounding co-presence were then further interrogated through ‘digital bricolage’:Footnote ²⁹ the staging of the virtual audience on iPads in the auditorium in which Jack Gleeson was physically present and his subsequent interaction with them. Fuchs's use of ‘bricolage’ for this process is particularly fitting, as it highlights the sense that physical and virtual co-presence are not conceived as mutually exclusive categories, but rather that they are both, in their own way, always already simulacra. This idea was strengthened by the occasional use of point-of-view camera shots through which the remote audience saw the pre-uploaded audience (i.e. in some cases themselves) in the auditorium from Mark's perspective, which even further destabilized the boundaries between performer and spectator as well as those between physical and virtual co-presence. Gleeson implicitly touches on the ‘dialectics of embodiment and disembodiment’Footnote ³⁰ in the context of co-presence when he remarks, ‘maybe my job is to try to make the audience feel as if they are there’.Footnote ³¹ In the programme relating to the play, O'Connell further complicates the notion of presence by introducing yet another iteration (in the sense that Gleeson acts as a ‘substrate’ of the writer): ‘Even though “I” am always present on stage (uploaded into the younger and more compelling substrate of Jack) I'm also absent … I am not here. And you are not here. But something is about to happen in our absence.’Footnote ³²

In one of the first scenes, Mark proceeds to tell the audience that he can show everyone the view they would have been assigned based on the kind of ticket that they bought, by using a point-of-view shot that purports to display the exact angle and perspective from which they would have seen the play, giving each audience member the feeling that they are unique. The empty seats replaced by virtual simulacra of the audience stage theatrical co-presence in intriguing ways, reminding us of the absence of physical bodies sitting together and sharing a space as a crucial aspect of traditional accounts of theatre, but at the same time establishing a visual co-presence as well as physical proximity between the pre-uploaded audience and the performer in the actual theatrical space.

Beyond the notion of spectatorship, questions of presence are further negotiated in the merging of the human body with the machine as a central theme of the play as well as its staging, which corresponds to the challenging of ‘the binaries of the biological and the virtual, the organic and the inorganic, the machine and the flesh’ that constitutes a key feature of postdigital performance.Footnote ³³ Figure 1 shows the translation of this idea onto the stage: in this still taken from a production at Burgtheater Wien,Footnote ³⁴ Michael Maertens's arm is overlaid by the digital representation of an arm on the screen. Almost seamlessly, the still visually aligns the human body with its digital simulacrum, and yet, at the same time, Mark notes that he has ‘no great desire to think of [him]self as a machine’,Footnote ³⁵ self-reflexively drawing attention to the screen as a form of illusion, or, as he puts it, ‘simulation’.Footnote ³⁶

FIGURE 1. Michael Maertens as Mark in the Burgtheater production Die Maschine in mir (2021). The digital representation of an arm on the screen overlaps – and thus visually merges – with the human arm of the performer. Photograph by Marcella Ruiz Cruz.

Be here now: engaging (with) the audience

To Be a Machine 1.0 begins with a close-up of the character Mark greeting the audience and an immediate breaking of the (virtual) fourth wall as he addresses them directly, using the somewhat hackneyed phrase ‘I hope you're doing well in these strange times’:

Mark then asks the audience to ‘try to forget about the screen you're staring into – just for a short while’ and to ‘try to picture [him], not in your laptop, but standing on stage’.Footnote ³⁸ Mark tells the audience that he is ‘here at the Project Arts Centre in Dublin’ and is happy that ‘so many of you could be here too’.Footnote ³⁹ The fact that Mark does not distinguish between the physical performance space in Dublin and the audience's remote locations (presumably) in their own homes creates a convergence of different spatialities that challenges dichotomies between physical and digital co-presence from the very start of the performance.

While the audience is initially led to believe that Mark is speaking to them in real time, as Fuchs notes, ‘the camera moves back to reveal a digital trompe-l'oeil: this is actually Mark's face on an iPad, on an empty stage’.Footnote ⁴⁰ The notion of trompe-l'oeil in this context is particularly fitting, as it refers to a deliberately deceptive representation – or, indeed, simulacrum – of an object that is made to look three-dimensional, even though it is drawn on a flat surface. Again, the performance employs ‘asynchronous time registers’, this time in a purposely misleading manner, as a way of drawing attention to the ‘seams and artifices within the otherwise smooth spaces of the digital’,Footnote ⁴¹ and in this way exemplifying the notion of ‘bugs and glitches’ as key aspects of postdigital performance. With regard to the notion of co-presence, this opening scene and the ensuing ‘digital trompe l'oeil’ challenge the audience's perception of their temporal synchronicity with the performance as well as – potentially – the reliability and sincerity of Mark as a character.

Perhaps for this very reason, Mark repeatedly assures the audience that the performance is ‘authentic’ and happening ‘live’, an assertion visually supported by a red button with the word ‘LIVE’ in the upper left corner of the Vimeo screen.Footnote ⁴² In the context of one such statement, Mark admits,

This passage is noteworthy in the present context for a number of reasons. First, Mark's statement that it is the first time he has ever been onstage assumes a comic quality and questions the reliability of the information provided, given that Jack Gleeson (whom we do not, at that point, know to be a fictionalized version of O'Connell) has gained worldwide fame as the character Joffrey in the most-watched show in history, HBO's Game of Thrones (a fact which is acknowledged in the play at a later point).Footnote ⁴⁴ Second, Mark addresses the mediatization of the performance, underlining its supposed authenticity and spontaneity by noting that ‘things can go wrong’, and introducing what Fuchs in the context of digital theatre at large terms ‘a Brechtian distance from realism’.Footnote ⁴⁵ While the Brechtian Verfremdungseffekt is certainly an important point of reference in this context, in To Be a Machine 1.0 the ‘glitches’ do not necessarily – or at least not primarily – seem to have the function of a radical distancing. Rather, they serve as a way of acknowledging the performer's and the audience's shared circumstances during the pandemic (an idea highlighted by Mark's reassuring statement that ‘we are all in this together’) and thus, in fact, strengthening their emotional bond. In this context, the ‘post-’ in ‘post-Brechtian’ used by Jarvis and Savage when they describe postdigital artworks as characterized by ‘an ostensibly post-Brechtian surfacing of the messy hidden processes that lurk behind the shiny veil of an interface’ could be a helpfully relational term,Footnote ⁴⁶ similar to the ‘post’ in ‘postdigital’: a modifier indicating a complex negotiation, rather than rejection, of the concept at hand.

During the performance, Mark repeatedly asks questions of the staged pre-recorded audience, calling on individual members and zooming in on their faces. At one point, it also becomes possible for the remote audience to reply to questions via the Chat function in real time. In most cases, these questions are emotionally charged and call for affective responses, for instance, ‘what do you miss most about going to the theatre?’Footnote ⁴⁷ By reading out specific answers and engaging with them (seemingly) spontaneously,Footnote ⁴⁸ Mark connects with the audience members on an emotional level via an acknowledgement of their existence behind the computer screen. Giving audience members the chance to voice their opinions and visions via the Chat box not only establishes an even stronger emotional bond between performer and audience; it also facilitates a certain sense of community between audience members in the absence of physical co-presence and potential chance encounters during interval drinks (the latter being by far the most common reply to the question posed). By asking the audience to disclose what they miss about the physical act of going to the theatre, Mark invites them to imagine an almost utopian space in the past (and potentially the future) as yet another example of different overlapping temporalities and spatialities in this performance.

This possibility of forming a temporary community between audience members was, however, soon shut down, as the Chat box was closed after a short while, once Mark began reading out some of the responses and reacting to them onstage. On the one hand, this rather sudden preclusion of further communication heightened the sense of ephemerality of the virtual communities established, highlighting the prevalent sense of isolation experienced during the pandemic. On the other hand, it made the audience even more reliant on Mark for a sense of emotional connection and mutual understanding, further strengthening the affective ties between performer and audience.

Where I end and you begin: new forms of connection

When discussing Dead Centre's vision for To Be a Machine 1.0 in an interview, co-director Bush Moukarzel highlighted that ‘the dynamic that happens between the performer and our distant audience is an attempt to make a new kind of COVID-connection … How can you reach people when you're not in the same room?’Footnote ⁴⁹ What Moukarzel describes as a wish to find a ‘new kind of connection’ between performer and audience and to ‘reach’ the other becomes a central thematic thread woven into the play, which contributes to the creation of an emotional alignment with the audience.Footnote ⁵⁰

In the opening monologue, Mark discusses the mediatization of the performance we are watching as a necessity, making explicit what at least some audience members may be thinking – that he is ‘just another face on a screen’ and that ‘this isn't an ideal way for us to meet’. In this scene, Mark appears to empathize with the audience, creating an emotional connection to them in lieu of physical co-presence, a strategy that becomes more pronounced over the course of the performance. By acknowledging and relating to the audience's (posited) struggle and desire for connection and interaction in times of lockdown and offering a potential way of ‘helping’, Mark establishes – or perhaps aims to establish – what Döveling, Harju and Sommer call ‘alignment’ in the context of their discussion of digital affect cultures: ‘discursively constructed subject positions [that] invite emotional identification’.Footnote ⁵¹ This idea is further strengthened by Mark's use of the inclusive pronoun ‘we’ and his direct address of the audience via the second-person pronoun ‘you’, as well as the fact that, having uploaded ourselves into the performance's cloud, we are already familiar with Jack Gleeson's/Mark's face, which leads to a certain sense of familiarity.Footnote ⁵² Through the use of emotional alignment, the performance thus constructs a sense of emotional sincerity, spontaneity and purportedly ‘authentic’ liveness not in spite of, but in fact through, an acknowledgement of the impossibility of sharing the same physical space at the present moment and the audience's perceived frustration relating to this matter. The emotional engagement of the audience is, of course, not unique to postdigital and/or (post-)pandemic performance, constituting a mainstay of dramatic theory and practice since antiquity.Footnote ⁵³ However, this aspect becomes all the more important with the impossibility of physical co-presence, as muting an online performance, opening another tab, or closing the browser or platform altogether is comparably easier than the more arduous task of standing up and walking out during a synchronous on-site performance.Footnote ⁵⁴

The repeated assurance of sincerity and authenticity – a central aspect of debates surrounding liveness and co-presence in theatre and performance studies – brought forward by Mark is, however, significantly complicated and, to a certain extent, undermined by the uploading of the audience's pre-recorded affective reactions, which foregrounds their performative nature and their function as an abstract form of currency needed to gain access to the performance. When Mark later makes a joke onstage, a single audience member is shown to laugh, which leads Mark to thank them and note that he ‘didn't know if anyone would find that funny. Thank God you're here, whoever you are.’Footnote ⁵⁵ This first interaction works out well for the character; however, at a later point, the audience appears to go rogue, as Mark is no longer able to control their reactions. In vain, he repeatedly attempts to explain that ‘that bit wasn't supposed to be funny’, as more and more audience members join in the laughter. As Fuchs notes in this context, ‘the usual function of canned laughter – to underscore the humor in what the performer has said and encourage a live audience to laugh along – is upended, almost as though the laughter machine had malfunctioned, or the algorithm had some bug’.Footnote ⁵⁶ Fuchs's notion of a faulty ‘laughter machine’ or ‘algorithm’ implicitly seems to hark back to key concerns of postdigital performance, in which ‘bugs and glitches … operate as ghosts in the machine that allow chance computational and electronic phenomena to appear and participate in structure [sic] of the work’.Footnote ⁵⁷ The recording and uploading process of the virtual audience and the performer's later interaction with them – who at one point display a reaction that can neither be controlled by the performer nor by themselves – thus work to further destabilize a binary, exclusionary understanding of digital ‘versus’ non-digital co-presence.

To Be a Machine 1.0 ends with the thematically appropriate song ‘My Body Is a Cage’ by Arcade Fire played after the opening line of the play, ‘I hope you're doing well in these strange times’, is repeated twice by Mark, this time only as a digital simulacrum on the iPad, which is becoming increasingly faulty as the video starts skipping. At its ending, the performance thus comes to a (glitchy) full circle, which could be read as an implicit comment on common conceptualizations of drama as a unique and unrepeatable event that no longer seem to be applicable to postdigital performance. The faulty technology leaves the virtual Mark on the screen in a seemingly endless state of limbo, as the ‘real’ actor has disappeared while we were – unwittingly – watching his virtual alter ego. In the context of co-presence, the final sentence of the playtext, ‘We see a wide shot of the ipad [sic] on stage and the audience: machines singing to machines’,Footnote ⁵⁸ is particularly noteworthy. Rather than implying a final transition from human to machine, it could be read as a process of gradual convergence from embodied to postdigital spectatorship that has taken place throughout the performance. To Be a Machine 1.0 shows that the organic and the virtual, the human and the machine, are no longer mutually exclusive categories in a postdigital culture, but act as flexible containers that are subject to constant (re)negotiation and (re)mediation.