"Might theater be used to probe this undeniable shift in consciousness ushered in by ubiquitous computing?"

-- Adriene Jenik



Adriene recommends these online literary links.

The Early Years of Desktop Theater (1)

___by Adriene Jenik




    Professor:

    Listen up all you drugged First-World citizens!
    You cubicled misanthrops
    You gamers, you clubbers,
    You yearners for a purpose.

    Listen as closely as you can

    We'll do our best to get beyond
    Your bipolarity
    Your ADD

    We are interrupting your chatting to bring you Santaman's Harvest

    A tale of food, health and hope
    A tale of seed, weed, and greed

    Your attention economy is about to go bankrupt.
    You might as well stick around
 These, the opening lines of "INVISIBLE INTERLUDES I: Santaman's (2) Harvest," inaugurate a new artform: desktop theater. Visual chat rooms represent anticipatory spaces ripe for dramatic play. Chatters are simultaneously static (seated in front of their terminals) and in motion (on screen), silent, yet speaking, alone, yet crowded into a small space. Those of us committed to breaking down the barrier between actor and spectator find immediate interest in the arrangement of participants sharing the same arena, already masked and performing versions of themselves.

In the process of developing these live theatrical experiments (3), many questions have arisen. What constitutes theater? How might drama occur separated from the body and voice and shared space? What new possibilities for language exist in this forum? How can poetic or rhetorical speech attract and sustain group attention in an arena of distraction? Once we are connected do we have anything of substance to say to one another? Might theater be used to probe this undeniable shift in consciousness ushered in by ubiquitous computing?



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