David Cameron - Drama and Digital Arts Cultures

DRAMA AND DIGITAL
ARTS CULTURES

Methuen Drama Engage offers original reflections about key practitioners, movements, and genres in the fields of modern theatre and performance. Each volume in the series seeks to challenge mainstream critical thought through original and interdisciplinary perspectives on the body of work under examination. By questioning existing critical paradigms, it is hoped that each volume will open up fresh approaches and suggest avenues for further exploration.

Series Editors

Mark Taylor-Batty

Senior Lecturer in Theatre Studies, Workshop Theatre, University of Leeds, UK

Enoch Brater

Kenneth T. Rowe Collegiate Professor of Dramatic Literature & Professor of English and Theater, University of Michigan, USA

Titles

Adaptation in Contemporary Theatre

by Frances Babbage

ISBN 9781472531421

Authenticity in Contemporary Theatre and Performance

by Daniel Schulze

ISBN 9781350000964

Beat Drama: Playwrights and Performances of the Howl Generation

edited by Deborah R. Geis

ISBN 9781472567871

The Contemporary American Monologue: Performance and Politics

by Eddie Paterson

ISBN 9781472585011

Social and Political Theatre in 21st-Century Britain: Staging Crisis

by Vicky Angelaki

ISBN 9781474213165

Theatre in the Dark: Shadow, Gloom and Blackout in Contemporary Theatre

edited by Adam Alston and Martin Welton

ISBN 9781474251181

Watching War on the Twenty-First Century Stage: Spectacles of Conflict

by Clare Finburgh

ISBN 9781472598660

DRAMA AND DIGITAL
ARTS CULTURES

David Cameron, Michael Anderson,
and Rebecca Wotzko

Series Editors

Enoch Brater and Mark Taylor-Batty

Bloomsbury Methuen Drama

An imprint of Bloomsbury Publishing Plc

The authors thank Dr Celina McEwen for her contributions to

Digital arts cultures

This book is about exciting and creative things made possible by sometimes boring and everyday technologies. It is a tour of some of the socially interesting forms of playful exploration, collaboration, and improvised performance to be found in contemporary digital arts practices drawn from games, education, online media, technology-enabled performance, and the creative industries. Some of these tools and spaces for art might still seem cutting edge, while others will be quite established and almost mundane even to those who might consider themselves late adopters of technology. Some of the specific tools and technologies referred to in this book may even have already come and gone in popularity or been replaced by a new killer application, for that is the nature of working and researching in a field now heavily influenced by the exponential innovation and development paths of digital media. A companion website to this book can be found at www.drama-technology.com.

This book uses the concept of digital arts cultures as an umbrella term for a broad range of practices and aesthetic forms. It includes cases where technologies are used as a tool in the production of new hybrid forms of digital/analogue performance, and also examples where the art or practice could only exist in the procedural medium of the digital. We see characteristics of both the digital (code) and the analogue (human) working together to generate the new realities and worlds that emerge from the convergence of digital media forms with performative arts practices. This aligns with Kattenbelts description of intermediality, which

assumes a co-relation in the actual sense of the word, that is to say a mutual affect. Taken together, the redefinition of media co-relationships and a refreshed perception resulting from the co-relationship of media means that previously existing medium specific conventions are changed, which allows for new dimensions of perception and experience to be explored. (2008, p. 25)

Intermediality helps to explain how the presence of digital technology in arts cultures provides access to what Christiane Paul calls the infinite possibilities of recycling and reproduction, made possible by digital media that are interactive, dynamic, customisable and participatory, to name just a few key characteristics (2005, p. 40). By extension, the hybrid nature of intermediality means there are also practically infinite combinations of digital and analogue performance made possible in these new dimensions.

Whose cultures?

Participation in these hybrid digital arts cultures is predicated on access to the hardware, software, and networks that are discussed as part of the everyday world throughout this book. It is acknowledged that this is a view of the everyday that may only be possible to those like the authors with a measure of economic, social, educational, and class privilege. It is a distinctly Western perspective, although the globalizing effects of digital technology are such that many of the digital arts cultures considered in this book are increasingly open both in terms of more equitable access and in their ability to be reproduced and remixed to suit the different needs and purposes of individuals and communities. Consider the following observation in the New York Times from 1996, reporting differing access to technology and the internet between two Californian schools located in the heart of Americas early digital revolution. One is a prestigious private school, and the other a public school serving one of the regions poorest communities, and the digital divide between these two schools in the heart of Silicon Valley provides perhaps the most striking example anywhere in the nation of a widening gap between children who are being prepared for lives and careers in the information age, and those who may find themselves held back (Poole, 1996).

The notion of a digital divide contributing to real-world inequalities is possibly even stronger today than it was more than two decades ago, though sometimes it is subtler than simply having, or not having, access to a digital technology. Now a very significant divide could be around, for example, the brand of mobile device one can afford to buy, whether access to the internet is censored or monitored by a government, or whether popular software is available in a certain language or accommodates accessibility needs. As we discuss here a new wave of concern about young people not being adequately prepared for modern life if they do not know how to code software and design hardware often pitched as a case of programme or be programmed. Some of this preparation is not about equity of opportunity and access to wealth but rather about serving the voracious needs of twenty-first-century capitalism for programmers, data miners, engineers, and technicians as the new labour force. This book seeks to highlight the creative and artistic affordances and opportunities that are also to be found, helping to shift young people towards making and creating as well as consuming new forms of media, entertainment, education, and performance. Digital arts cultures are a sign that people are not yet completely powerless to address the economic, social, educational, and class issues that digital technology creates or feeds.

Drama is front and centre in our approach to digital technologies for this very reason. Nicola Shaughnessy has identified how applied performance is being used to address the digital divide by focusing not so much on availability of technology, but on how to make use of it to engage in meaningful social practices. Shaughnessys volume contains detailed examinations of the work of practitioners such as the UK theatre company C&T, who are finding it possible to tap into available technologies such as mobile phones and the internet in places like Malawi and Kenya in Africa, making it feasible to bring a blend of drama/technology to their applied theatre work in even relatively poor rural and urban areas. This allows a more authentically situated engagement by participants with the issues facing young people in a globalized world. Drama helps people to harness available technologies to develop social capital, and Shaughnessy argues that technology must be embodied to do this type of transformational creative and educational work because: