Category: Digital Natives

Articles tracking conferences and events as part of the DIGITAL NATIVES cooperation project.

The Generation of Joyful Knowledge

The Generation of Joyful Knowledge

With the Silver Surfer world premiere at Volx/Margareten, the studio of the Volkstheater Wien has brought out an innovative theatrical experiment, in which the bracket between millenials and silver surfers finds its expression in all their contradictory and appropriate facets, without abandoning the critical attitude towards smart technology.

Barbara Pálffy / Volkstheater

Ganaele Langlois is Professor in Communication Studies at the York University. Her book Meaning in the Age of Social Media (Palgrave Macmillan, 2014) studies how the very concept of meaning is being reshaped in the light of human-computer interaction. Following Langlois, in the process of creation of meaning online, the human user is only «a component, but not the driving force of these systems». A social networking site (such as Facebook or Instagram) is based on a very complex software architecture, only partly activated by us and made by a sum of technical objects that possess their own agency and are able to influence, reshape, and bend to their will the human actors.

Digital Natives is a cooperation project by the Union des Théâtres de l’Europe (UTE) with the support of Creative Europe, that involves the Volkstheater Wien, Schauspiel Köln, the Hugarian Theatre of Cluj, the Comédie de Reims and the National Theatre of Northern Greece. At the end of March 2019, Vienna was animated by a two day-long series of conferences, talks and performances, all dedicated to exploring how twenty years of interactive Web technologies were able to determine a new way of looking at reality and living interconnected lives. Digital interaction can indeed be interpreted as an opportunity in digging new paths to creativity: but, if relationships seem to no longer have limits, how can we trace boundaries between a fake reality and a real fakeness?

Since the advent of anthropology, human sciences have come to terms with the importance of a specific context, a system of social conventions and common rituals that really defines the roots and the logic of a local community. The very concepts of “openness” and “closure” can be fully understood only by measuring how such conventions and rituals invite or refuse a negotiation with others coming from different cultures.

If, back in the days, the Internet was created as a powerful vehicle to exchange data and information, Web 2.0 – those platforms characterized by highly interactive functionalities – deeply changed the modes used by different communities to establish a dialogue. We are not only talking about a new order and pace in mingling social traditions, but also new languages and velocities able to reshape the basic forms of intergenerational communications.

This is the thematic core of Silver Surfer, a project by Volkstheater’s Youth Programme, directed by Constance Cauers and Malte Andritter, that had its world premiere Saturday 30 March at the Volx/Margareten in Vienna.

Five adults and six teenagers meet on the same theatrical stage to discuss their everyday life, building, layer by layer, a dense collective discourse around the “digital diet” of the present society.

The wide blank stage is surrounded by translucent curtains, a sort of open limbo between two generations. A sparse vegetation of black lecterns grows on the empty white space; each stand has a LED light that illuminates the faces when the actors in front talk. Between rapid accounts of conversations with mom and dad and quick dialogues through which the digital natives walk the first steps into a romantic affair, every line of this very rhythmic and sparkling text is addressed to the audience. This shows how disconnected we really are when engaged in virtual communication. “Online relationship”, “Digital daily routine”, “Digital assault” are some of the titles that break the text in several scenes; but there are also such terms as “Nude pictures”, “Porn”, “Darknet”, all related to “the dark side of the Internet”. The virtual world is always a mirror of the actual one, where an inattentive traveler can easily get lost.

In establishing virtual contacts with the outer social circle, a turning point may then be a solid education, a kind of knowledge that makes us cautious and curious towards how we can actually appear to the eyes of the others and how we can understand and gain control over new systems of power. In his model of “discourse analysis”, Michel Foucault used to look at language and practices as battlefield where one has to oppose resistance to a number of power structures. In Langlois’ opinion such war is nowadays fought through the creation and the negotiation of meaning: «Media transform the conditions within which we humans come to interpret, produce, and share meanings. At the same time, media can be harnessed by specific social forces to establish power formations». Social media are fundamentally based on the idea that an individual view of the world can recognize itself through the act of circulating information and thoughts, in a way which is no longer able to distinguish private from public content.

The moment when the world was divided into online and offline is buried in the past: the Italian media theorist Giovanni Boccia Artieri (University of Urbino) argues that «we are facing an accumulation of occasions in which individuals “play” with self-representation forms, thanks to the diffusion of reproduction and production technologies in daily life, from digital photo cameras to editing software». The resulting media forms are very close to the ones promoted by the mainstream media and such scenario is reinforced by a growing “disintermediation” (the removal of intermediaries in a supply chain), encountered both in the market and in the individual construct of reality.

In his speech at “Digital Hermits”, the first Digitization Conference in Cluj (read the report here), a very young Hungarian YouTuber, Tamás Trunk, was explaining how quickly a teenager can launch his/her own online career as an influencer, only by endorsing the right product at the right time. Because virtual communities are already prompt in getting engaged in a communal attitude to marketing and in sharing ideas.

And yet, Silver Surfer focuses on the controversial duplicity between virtual and actual presence, observing how certain natural dynamics of interaction are today encapsulated in a form of “digital milieu”, where everyone has to prove his or her level of connection, to be a witness of a shifting era.

The performance is a generous mix of vivacity and humor, the group of teenagers is very efficient in presenting different approaches to storytelling. Singing songs live, the actors display a polished body language and an accurate work on facial expressions that become extremely important in the way they convey and share with the spectator what such a fluvial text couldn’t, especially when the choir speaks in unison, winking at a Brecht’s “didactic drama” and, at the same time, portraying the effects of fixed thought.

One-to-one relations (between natives or with the «instaGrans») can in fact serve as a good model for political involvement, which is another big “black hole” of the proliferating digital culture(s): the absence of a real political attitude, the end of what Jürgen Habermas called “communicative action”. This has historically founded on language and the possibility of formulating an argumentation, as deliberate as possible but able to be contested and discredited.

To gain back what Habermas had envisioned, the German philosopher Byung-Chul Han proposes a quest for an alternative, a “digital rationality” that comes from a crucial understanding: the “digital swarm” is not a mass, rather an aggregate of individual egos not organized in a political construct.

As inhabitants of different areas of the same gigantic virtual community, our very imagery is being replaced with a wall full of slogans and tags, a semantic formula that gives the users the impression of being part of the same family of friends and followers, consuming and sharing the very same symbolic forms, productive «networked publics» (Diana Boyd) who recognize themselves in the same hidden processes.

While the social media establish themselves as the most advanced meaning machines, where a users’ response can discipline, at the same time, the accurateness of advertising and the relevance of the news, we are all “texting”, “snapchatting”, “skypeing”, “instagramming”, “posting”, “twitting”. All terms that had no sense less than a couple of decades ago and that now are included in every dictionary, at least in our glittering Western world. What is interesting about Silver Surfer is the way its energy sets the stage for a new kind of critique, because a clear division between “apocalyptic” and “integrated” (as Umberto Eco had defined two attitudes towards new technologies) is no longer there.

Thus, the idea of inviting members from Veterans and Generation Z to handle the same vocabulary and together funding a common language is an intelligent getaway to gain knowledge by living a real-time experience.

«What’s missing again at the moment that is has to be now?» is the last sentence of a long “teen choir”. Facebook suggests us to re-post a “memory” of a time when we were still married or still pregnant with our first daughter, and suddenly the past becomes a revenant; the future appears under the mask of “events” to be interested in. Between

posts, video-chats, virtual encounters and Instagram stories that 24 hours later are gone, this is the scenario: a condition where present is the only tense. At the end of the day, theatre is one of the last occasions to gather in the same room, among unknown people, and together occupy a time and a space which are owned and negotiated by an actual community. The same that, in the bar of the Volx/Margareten, has shared a drink and toasted to the wonderful effort of this bunch of members from a generation of joyful knowledge.

 

Published on 2 May 2019

Mixing the languages: personal encounters within a digital framework

Mixing the languages: personal encounters within a digital framework

UTE’s Sofia correspondent, Ina Doublekova, gives a vivid picture of what happened  in Vienna’s Volkstheater during a warm pre-spring weekend in March through the workshop and premiere’s experience of 25 young Europeans from five different places and cultural and migrational backgrounds made possible by the educational theatre project Digital Natives.

DIGITAL NATIVES is a cooperation project between five of the UTE’s member theatres: Volkstheater Wien, Comédie de Reims, Hungarian Theatre of Cluj, Schauspiel Köln and National Theatre of Northern Greece. The starting point of their collaboration is the play Concord Floral by Jordan Tannahill, a play about teenage identity and interactions, the power of perception and technology. The five theatres will take the text and work on it, either staging a production or using its themes as the basis for workshops with amateur teenage actors. The theatres, together with their amateur actors, will simultaneously develop a digital experiment during the rehearsal period.” – explains the text on UTE’s website, presenting this year-long, transnational educational initiative. However, what is not mentioned in this paragraph and naturally does not fit into this kind of project descriptions is that the teenagers involved are 90 in total – 15 in Cologne, 40 in Thessaloniki, 10 in Cluj and 10 in Reims, 5 stage directors are working with them on a weekly basis during the rehearsal period. Now just imagine how these five different groups meet in these theaters in each city almost every weekend. How they work with and on Concord Floral play (or do not work on it all but still spend time together), probably often simultaneously. So close and so far away at once – in the same theatrical dimension and at different geographical locations. Put in the same project and virtual framework but apart, at least in the first step of the project.

And yet, one weekend they all came together for a very first time in Vienna. This meeting was not in the initial schedule of the project but instead an almost spontaneous change in plans, which the Volkstheater agreed to host. In the morning the teenagers participated in their first ever workshop together and in the evening they attended the premiere of Silver Surfers – a performance created by the Volkstheater with seniors and millenials, again in the frame of #digitalnatives19, that you can read more about in Sergio Lo Gatto’s text.

Witnessing their first live encounter, after three premieres of Concord Floral already done in Vienna, Cologne and Reims and more importantly after all the participants having been in touch with one another via Skype for more than a half year now, was thrilling and though-provoking experience. Having to describe it – meaning to “zip” it into words for people who were not there – for an online journal makes it even more so.

The teenagers met in one of the rehearsal rooms of Volkstheater on a Saturday morning. The idea was for them to get acquainted with one another and also get a grasp on how the workshops happen in each city, what their counterparts have been doing,. For this purpose each of their trainers – Simon Windisch (Vienna), Bassam Ghazi (Cologne), Naïma Perlot-Lhuillier (Reims) – worked with the whole group for about an hour each, involving them into activities and trainings that they normally practice at home. Needless to say, at the beginning the atmosphere was awkward. Most of the kids were shy. One of the first rules established was that languages needed to be mixed. The first meeting ground for that, as it was noted, was the English language, which was not native for anyone but was the one which everyone spoke. Then came the body language. Everyone was encouraged get louder and louder, to stretch beyond the timidity, to open up to the others. To look them in the eyes. To team up with someone and to learn to follow their gaze, to recognize their laughter or cry from a distance. Some of the teenagers started acting out. One could tell that they got into it and got intrigued. Links were built; question of power (and superpower) was also raised. Through exercises and games synergy came into being. The languages were mixed up indeed. The atmosphere was now joyful and exalted. The magic of a dense personal encounter had worked out.

And here aroused a major question: how much this result was favored by the online encounters the teenagers had before their live meeting? And how their interaction online will be changed from now on that they know each other in person? What is the recipe for mixing up the language of the digital communication with the one of the personal interaction in the right proportions to make it taste good and right?

On the next day the conference, Digitality and Democracy, took place, focusing on Big Data, power and access to knowledge, possible ways to achieve digital maturity. It was moderated by Corinna Milborn, co-author of Change the Game. Wie wir uns das Netz von Facebook und Google zurückerobern (Christian Brandstätter Verlag, 2018) The other speakers were Dr. Sarah Spiekermann-Hoff (Professor at Wirtschaftsuniversität Wien, author and researcher), Angelika Adensamer (Lawyer and criminologist, Policy Advisor at epicenter.works) and Stefanie Wuschitz (Artist, researcher and hacktivist).

During the discussion, many crucial issues were touched upon: the personal data collection and the fact that all our activity online is tracked, which violates the fundamental right of doing things without being under surveillance, thus this gathered information is used as an instrument of control and manipulation. What is more, algorithms are not transparent and tend to strengthen inequality. One possible solution mentioned is for these processes to be led bottom-up, which is not the case at the moment, since the major players on the field like Facebook, Amazon and Google are privately owned corporations. Furthermore, the situation of internet security in Europe was discussed, comparing it to countries like Russia and China, which are developing their own internet, while most of the servers where the European information is stored are still in the USA.

Without undermining at all the importance of those significant concerns, it seems that there are several outstanding tendencies when we talk about the digital world that we inhabit in general. First of all, we talk about it a lot and discussions about the near and distant future are quite common these days, which, is already a symptom.  Second of all, those debates often seem to be only two-sided (which was not the case for this conference) – there is one side claiming that the advance of digital world and the artificial intelligence is good and there is another side explaining why it is bad. Third of all, the digital is presented as a separate entity, a world of its own, not connected to the analog world outside the screens of the mobile devices.

Having attended both events in the course of 24-hours, it seems that probably we should start thinking of it as a mixture, as the right balance and between the two, as the golden middle. The digital is here to stay. And it is part of the analog daily life. And vice-versa. Nowadays they complement each other and how this relationship works needs to be examined deeper and deeper.

 

Ina Doublekova, Sofia, April 2019

 

David vs. Goliath

David vs. Goliath

At Reims Scènes d’Europe, held between 24th January – 7th February, which presented artistically valuable works in performing arts marked by a diversity in genre, the performance Concord Floral premiered at the Comedie de Reims. Based on the award-winning play by the Canadian playwright Jordan Tannahill, this production is part of a project by the Union des Théâtres de l’Europe, #digitalnatives19, which has brought together five theatres – from Cluj, Cologne, Thessaloniki, Vienna and Reims – to work with this play.

The starting point of the project, which commenced last June and is to continue until June this year, is to explore the balance between the digital and analogue world, especially among the teenagers growing up amidst global digitisation. The production at the Volkstheater Wien has focused on how digitisation affects today’s teenagers’ everyday life, as well as on cyber-bullying, while the performance by the Hungarian Theatre of Cluj will concentrate on positive and negative aspects of global digital communication. The idea is to have five interpretations of Tannahill’s texts, all performed by teenagers, amateur actors. It is worth mentioning that the text was created in Tannahill’s workshops with teenagers, that it has been performed both in schools and in theatres. That was also the case with the performance in Reims, which cast ten teenagers aged between thirteen and seventeen.

One of the reasons for casting teenagers, amateur actors, is based on Tannahill’s belief that it is the amateurs who will inherit the 21st century, as he states in his book, “Theatre of the Unimpressed”: “The Internet’s nature of openness and perpetual liveliness makes it a space made for amateurs who are given the chance to make themselves known through creating in innovative, ground-breaking ways”.

Within the frame of the Festival and of the project #digitalnatives19, Comédie de Reims was also the venue of a conference which tackled various aspects of digitisation. The conference was moderated by the anthropologist Elen Riot, while the topic of the amateur art breakthrough on the internet was addressed by Patrice Flichy, Professor of Sociology at the University of Marne-la-Vallee: “The internet produces amateurs, which is something that our society sees as a new phenomenon. Moreover, amateur practices are still developing thanks to the internet. Today, anyone can use creation and sharing tools which used to belong only to professionals. For example, amateurs can learn video editing by watching tutorials on YouTube, thus expanding their knowledge and creations. That is something we didn’t have before.”

Tannhill’s play takes place in an abandoned greenhouse known as Concord Floral, where a group of teenagers discover their torments, desires, dreams, weaknesses, sexual awakening, love of nature, while sharing it all in cyberspace. They have fled into the garden from the social plague, just like the heroes of Boccaccio’s The Decameron, which served as Tannahill’s main inspiration. However, while Florence in The Decameron is ravaged by the real plague, our present world is, in Concord Floral, affected by a metaphorical plague which all the children have escaped from, and decided to use the garden as a haven, a space of freedom, isolated, safe, and protected from their parents’ supervision. The Reims performance is marked by an extraordinary energy of the young performers who have won the audience with their dedicated, energetic, unrestrained, and sincere acting, playing the roles that echo their own lives. Dressed in colourful sequined clothes, they are placed on garish green grass. There are chairs scattered around, while the performers enjoy the rubble in the absence of parental order and supervision. Their play is guided by a DJ in the background, serving as a narrator who occasionally assumes the role of a controller, similar to the Orwell’s omnipresent Big Brother.

After long standing ovations, the director of the Reims performance, Ferdinand Barbet, said that the performance aims at revealing the real world to teenagers. During the rehearsals, they were constantly checking their mobile phones, immersed in various applications: “They keep taking photos and posting them on their profiles, that’s what’s typical for children of their age. They discuss everything quite openly on the internet, that’s what distinguishes them from my generation”, Barbet said.

In a very inspirational introduction to the conference about digitisation, Elen Riot said that Concord Floral was written with teenagers for teenagers, based on documentary material, and born out of young people’s reality: “It is a reflection on young people, on democracy and on the role of new technologies and social networks in their modes of socialization. If you don’t use new technologies, you are outside of society.” Furthermore, Riot mentioned some interesting insights made by Sherry Turkle, who claims that people are nowadays trapped in online exchanges and images they create about themselves. “I share, therefore I am”, has become a ubiquitous mantra, a contemporary response to Descartes’ rationalist thought “I think, therefore I am”. Today, sharing one’s intimate world has become young people’s life purpose, the primary means through which they construct their identities (and it is not only teens but also older generations who have become consumed by the same digital passion).  The phenomenon has been analysed by Steve Dixon, who has claimed that the internet and social networks like Facebook, Twitter and Instagram, are no longer mere virtual spaces, but fields of communication that keep gaining momentum, gradually becoming substitutes for real-life exchanges: “Internet communication is turning into a form of virtual performance of one’s self, it encompasses various forms of communication and representative aspects of everyday life. Theatre is being created by a great number of individuals who use the internet on daily basis, through e-mail communication, their personal websites and blogs, Facebook profiles, etc.” (Steve Dixon, Digital Performance. A History Of New Media In Theater, Dance, Performance Art, And Installation, The MIT Press, Cambridge, Massachusetts and London,  2007, 4.) Numerous internet profiles and blogs are digital palimpsests of Goffman’s ideas about representation in everyday life, where subject is being progressively erased, redefined, and re-established as a person/performer, within a computer screen as a theatre proscenium: “The world wide web is a space of therapeutic catharsis, and it creates the greatest theatre in the world which offers fifteen minutes of fame to everyone.”(Steve Dixon, Digital Performance. A History Of New Media In Theater, Dance, Performance Art, And Installation, The MIT Press, Cambridge, Massachusetts and London,  2007, 4.) That process leads to new configurations of individuality that obliterate borders between the human and the machine. Man becomes a cyborg, the one connected to the machines.

In line with these problems, Riot mentioned some new, alarming statistics published in Le Monde on 19th January, according to which an excessive exposure to monitors can cause problems, which is why young people in particular should learn how to be alone. The article states that intellectual and cognitive disorders have lately risen by 24 per cent, mental disorders by 54 per cent, and speech disorders by 94 per cent, all connected to an increased fixation to screens. Concluding the analysis of Sherry Turkle’s ideas, Riot expresses an attitude that the machines offer an illusion of friendships, without a demand for intimacy.

On the other hand, the teenagers in Reims’ Concord Floral find the value of the tangible, material world, which was also mentioned by Barbet after the performance: “In the play, the children discover the real world, the one which exists outside the internet and monitors, a life in the nature, in grass, the world outside, that is the point of the play. That is why we use real things in the performance: grass, old things, like this couch, objects filled with life, not abstract things.”

The analogue world of theatre is presented here as a ritual, holy space which preserves the reality crushed by the digital machine. It is a physically present stage which is trying to protect the material nature of the world. We recall the metaphor used by the theoretician Peggy Phelan in 1993, while considering the value of the presence in performing arts as opposed to digital art. She saw theatre as a poor David, struggling against the Goliath of the new media and technological capitalism. (Peggy Phelan, Unmarked: The Politics Of Performance, Routledge, Florence, 1993, 149) The hope remains that this David will save the old world, in its most valuable fragments at least.

Published on 27 February 2019 (Article originally written in Serbian by Ana Tasić and translated by Vesna Radovanović)

S.O.S. Encapsulation… or the Soul after Victory III

S.O.S. Encapsulation… or the Soul after Victory III

© Herwig Lewy

The riddle of the International Theatre Festival is its name: Interferences. This year’s sixth edition of the biennial tournament for collective representations in Cluj-Napoca, which has been held every two years since 2008, deals with the theme of war. From the 22nd to the 30th November 2018, 16 ensembles from 13 countries met in Transylvania, a cultural interface below the Carpathian Arc since antiquity.

The cultural diversity and multilingualism can be felt at every corner of the city. It is home to various spaces of experience of distant pasts, which in their linguistic expression meets daily today in Hungarian, Romanian and sometimes also in German. The memorial culture of the city with the name triangle amazes and wonders visitors at the everyday overlays, because besides Cluj-Napoca there are also the names Kolozsvár and Klausenburg. Thus, the two city centres, a Hungarian and a Romanian one, are connected with each other by a street on which the sculpture of a myth was placed. It is the myth of the founding history of Rome – a she-wolf feeding Romulus and Remus on a marble-covered pedestal with a portrait of Trajan, including the inscription: Alla Citta di Cluj – Roma Madre – MCMXXI. The visitor is confronted with the question: Is this still young memorial a reminiscence of 1921, staging Rome as a matrilineal origin for the city of Cluj-Napoca?

Time is Convention

Anyone looking at the sculpture from outside looks for words to understand what kind of représentation finds expression here. Judging by everyday political standards, it may well have been the intention to create sense to meet the challenges after the turn of 1989/1992. However, a link to the founding myths of the nation-building process after Romania’s founding one hundred years ago as a result of the Versailles peace negotiations has attracted too much social attention. Festival director Gábor Tompa, at the opening of the festival in the Hungarian theatre of Cluj-Napoca, gives a hint, both in his address in the festival catalogue and in his personal address: the theme of the festival is war. One hundred years has passed since the end of the First World War, whose peace negotiations dramatically and tragically rearranged the map of Europe. At the same time, however, they also prolonged warlike conflicts indefinitely until today. – In his speech, he directly asks the audience the question: “How can we remember war in ways other than that losers remember losers? – Because in a war there are no winners,” says Tompa.

From the spectator’s point of view, his suggestion makes the facets of the festival programme comprehensible much more quickly. The chosen season in the festival calendar is the time of mental heaviness in Europe. Autumn passes into winter and the days become shorter. And outside only fog circulates. Theatre as a festival needs such a stable sacred anchor, which is realized anew in a periodic sequence depending on the season. The word “sacred” floats in my mind as I listen attentively to Tompa’s words in the auditorium as I leaf through the catalogue, creating a certain sense of time and space. I’m thinking of Henri Hubert’s essay on La représentation du temps dans la religion et la magie from 1904, read recently on my tablet. Those who get involved with the festival events leave the normal space-time feeling of everyday life. The sacred space-time order captures a feeling of infinity and immutability. Such a joint search for sense in theatre competes with the fixed memorial culture, which wants to present stability as an unchangeable factor for everyday life as obligatory; a demand that is strived for in everyday life, but rarely fulfilled.

The theatre, which has its origins in magic, has its own unfixed foundation of meaning. It is an open project, a search for sense. If one accepts the festival from the spectator’s point of view, one agrees with sacred space-time. Tompa’s choice of pieces is based on this common search for meaning under the sign of a shared time and a shared space when he writes in his address in the festival catalogue: With the various types of war, it is important to speak of a theatre of fright. The terrible trauma caused by violence would call for an individual and collective “exorcism”. The fixed point of the search for meaning lies in the similarity between war and theatre, for they are the reciprocal actions of two opposing forces.

Scrape That Fiddle More Darkly

The selection of the various directorial manuscripts from different theatre families in Europe stands for the side of change, self-assessment and collective responsibility. Absorbing a few festival days demands a higher level of attention from visitors from outside and the admission that they can’t see everything. The simultaneous presence of English, French, Romanian and Hungarian, the languages of the guest performances, such as German, Greek, Hebrew, Italian, Lithuanian, Polish, Russian and Serbian, will also be added. There is a closely timed main programme in the main hall and in the studio. There is a supporting programme in the Tiff House, in the Tranzit House, in the Paintbrush Factory and in the Quadro Gallery. There are exhibitions and concerts. And for the first time there was a technical interference called Digital Hermits. This conference at the Tranzit House tried to explore the use of digital technologies and their impact on the coexistence of people in our world. A contribution on war that takes into account the consequences of the Cold War, when the Internet was born, to ensure communication between entities after a nuclear fallout. The focus was on user interfaces – also known as new media – and their own spaces of experience in and with time and space. It was seen as problematic that the dialogue between the generations leads to a dichotomy between the group of people who live completely without digital technologies and the group who no longer want to shape life without them. The connection of passions to the filter bubbles and echo chambers of the digital world unfortunately failed to materialize.

One question that has always been virulent for the two-thousand-year history of theatre is: How do people behave in war? – In a collapse crisis, laughter and crying not only alternate, they can also occur simultaneously. One person’s suffering is the other’s only short joy until the perspectives change and the persecutor becomes the persecuted. Milo Raus shows with his work Compassion. The history of the machine gun an impressice teichoscopy, to which the dramatic elements of the Greek tragedy are reduced. In it, this change of perspective is performed in a loop. The actress Ursina Lardi from the ensemble of the Schaubühne am Lehniner Platz in Berlin plays herself as a young development aid worker in Rwanda, where she witnessed the Hutu genocide of the Tutsi. Later she finds out that the person she helped became the perpetrator. The Belgian actress Consolate Sipérus also plays herself. As a baby, she was adopted by a Belgian couple. More than the country of origin, Rwanda, and the catalogue with the baby faces that can be chosen for adoption are not known to her. From the viewer’s point of view, this enormous amount of social facts is hardly bearable. And Lardi tells of the theatres of war with impressive power of speech and physical presence, as if she has just observed this quantity of irrational actions.

By représentation, Hubert means exactly this sacred time level. Just as in the auditorium on my tablet I work on an over one-hundred-year-old text in order to pursue questions of understanding about what is happening on stage, Lardi and Sipérus create a public sphere. Not just a public speech act, that is, one that can be seen by everyone, is performed here, at the same time an understanding of the event opens up for other group members who are not directly involved in the actual action. Now and here we take an insight into the events that took place on another continent in 1994. This is the quality of the festival, with which the riddle of the name, Interferences, is solved: it is the coincidence of all time levels in the concept of humanity. The model upheld in Europe since the Renaissance breaks itself in the face of the horrors of precisely this persistent humanity, no matter what skin colour, language, culture or religion it claims to be right and good for itself. The Greek drama models serve this quality.

Anna Badora of the Volkstheater Wien (Vienna Volkstheater) has created a link between antique representational drama and post-dramatic attempts to cope with the European present in Renaissance style. She stages an Iphigenia in Aulis by Euripides in the format of the Golden Ratio, in which Iphigenia is actually sacrificed at the end of the first part, with which the tragedy of Euripides, which for us has only been handed down as a fragment, ends. The war really begins with Badora. While the battle rages, we spectators go to the toilet or to the fresh air. From the two thousand years in the past we fall in the second part into the Syrian present. Here, Stefano Massini’s text Occident Express serves as the basis for a play for the same actors who are now making their way to Europe as civil society from the war zones in Iraq and Syria.

It is said that waves of crisis lead to a learning process. Gabor Tompa shows in his in-house production of William Shakespeare’s Merchant of Venice that limits are inherent in this learning process. The fact that both actors, Gábor Viola and Zsolt Bogdán, can play both the role of Antonio and that of Shylock as respective double casts bears witness to the deep empathy for the characters that is necessary to represent sacrificial rituals. Antonio, whose sadness at the beginning may not be revealed to the audience until the end of the piece – at the beginning it is not business or love that causes his suffering – it is the quotations of the milieus and their internal morals made by Tompa in his soundscape installation, who let Antonio be as obviously sad as the mirror-inverted despair of Shylock, whose sacrifice in the end – analogous to Iphigenia’s sacrifice – is needed to restore that very internal morality after the group has gone through a common crisis. Antonio, like his alter ego Agamemnon (father of Iphigenia and at the same time commander who sacrifices his daughter), represents in this sense the permanent depression of a human being who knows that it always seeks the good, but at the same time always creates the bad.

Fatherland

The “exorcism” of the festival, which was the goal, took on a physically concrete form collectively and practically with the staging Vaterland in the choreography of Csaba Horváth and the stage design of Csaba Antal. The Forte Company presents text elements from Thomas Bernhard’s The Italians in a rhythmic and sporty sequence of scenes that gesturally play the timbres of Bernhard’s model. Bernhard, who in his will still wanted to ensure that no text, neither novel nor stage text, narrative or poem, would ever appear in Austria, was at war with the eccentric way of his fellow countrymen dealing with National Socialist traditions. The staging succeeds in allowing Bernhard to be regarded as the master of plastic surgery of collective passions that are unquestioned in memorial culture or devotional objects. Whether a geographical space is assigned a patrilineal or matrilineal original character is actually uninteresting.

In this way, the festival creates a concrete link to the themes of past years. Whereas in 2014, for example, it was still necessary to report on the stories of the body, this year the theme of war captures the passions in a way that suggests new approaches to the content of security policy measures, which are often difficult to understand in everyday life. The experiment on the formal side, such as Milo Rau’s, of exclusively exhibiting teichoscopy, seems all too minimalistic. We do not know whether the actress Ursina Lardi was really in Rwanda and whether Consolate Sipérius was really adopted. Here documentary theatre finds its limits in fictionality and has to compete with the classics, the timelessly valid dramas since antiquity. Mere indignation could perhaps have been problematized in connection with the digital filter bubbles and their echo chambers. But then the acting characters, whose limitations and weaknesses in Euripides or Shakespeare were excellently designed and presented in their plot constraints and intentions, would also have had to have been worked out more precisely in Milo Rau’s work. There are no spaces free of experience, even if the widespread contemporary encapsulation à la New Media and the generation conflicts associated with it might suggest it.

When a ship is rescued, the SOS emergency call is made beforehand and the bodies are rescued. The Interferences International Theatre Festival reminds us that the purpose of the SOS emergency call is to save souls. It demands their participation, a shared attention. An encapsulation in technical terms or as usual in analogue memorial culture, on the other hand, leads to isolation with fixed values of collective internal morals and their obligatory victims. By rejecting such tendencies of isolation, the theatre festival leads the search for meaning and sense in Cluj-Napoca.

Contrary to what the sculpture of the founding myth of the city of Rome and its staged history of origin suggests for Cluj-Napoca, the theatre has understood the origo principle. Florence Dupont can read about this punch line on the “monument” to Romulus and Remus: Rome – city without origin. The punchline is: there is no origin. There is only one diversity in mutual respect and recognition. This is what the origo principle stands for. Interferences is also the name for an unfinished search for sense. Theatre is and remains an open project, both in terms of content and form.

Published on 21 January 2019 (Article originally written in German)

Digital Hermits

Digital Hermits

© Valik Chernetskyi

“Digital Hermits”. Quite an oxymoron. Because, nowadays, no one could possibly consider him/herself a “hermit” within the digital realm. We are always tracked, chased, captured by complex calculation systems aimed to define us on the basis of what we like, what we look for, what we would desire to be, instead of what we actually are.

Digitisation I: Digital Hermits was the title of a very dense and compelling conference, the first of four: organized in Cluj-Napoca (Romania) in the frame of Digital Natives, a cooperation project between five of the UTE’s member theatres—Volkstheater Wien, Comédie de Reims, Hungarian Theatre of Cluj, Schauspiel Köln and National Theatre of Northern Greece.
Concord Floral by Jordan Tannahill (which premiered at Schauspiel Köln on 16 November 2018) is “a play about teenage identity and interactions, the power of perception and technology.” Each of the five theatres involved is going to stage a production or use the themes of the play as the basis for workshops with amateur teenage actors. A series of “digital experiments” will be the outcome of such collaboration and three other conferences will take place throughout the course of the project.
During the Interferences Festival 2018, produced by the Hungarian National Theatre in Cluj, three speakers were invited to share their thoughts about being part of this “new” digital turmoil: Mária Bernschütz, Tamás Trunk and Valér Veres. Three very different contributions, able to draw a multi-coloured picture of the numerous ways to approach digital cultures.

We all know our birthday, there’s no doubt about it. And yet, how sure are we about our role in the digital society? How closely are we watching the technological evolution, how aware are we about our influence in establishing a shared model of “living in the digital era”?
Mária Bernschütz presented an executive summary of which are the generations involved in the digitization process. Based on the so-called ‘generational theory’—initiated by two American historians, William Strauss and Neil Howe—Bernschütz’s speech tried to inscribe our “agency” in five categories, through which we should be able to locate our presence in the development of digital culture.

Ms. Bernschütz is Assistant Professor at the Department of Management and Business Economics (Budapest University of Technology and Economic), she teaches marketing media and research methodology. Her vivid contribution was aimed to show how technology influences individuals in their everyday lives. Feeling sorry for a rather rough generalization, Mária Bernschütz presents a sort of rationalistic scheme, that reveals how technological development could be used as a barometer for measuring generational gaps, according to age range.
“Do you know which generation you belong to?”, that’s the basic question of this inquiry, which is based on an in-depth qualitative research conducted on Hungarian society.
According to the results, the “Veterans” were born before 1946; the “baby boomers” were born after the Second World War and are the most involved in the reconstruction of the world after that disastrous event; they are evaluated as “the most technophobic” group. Generation X—between 1965 and 1979—is considered as the one of the “digital immigrants”: they came in touch with technology as adults. Generation Y—between 1980 and 1995—gathers people who were attending secondary school or were just enrolled in university when they have learned about “new media”; they are now quite used to smartphones and tablets. Members of the Generation Z were born between 1996 and 2000: they don’t even use pens or pencils anymore, Internet has been a part of their everyday lives from the very beginning. The latest one is the Alpha Generation—including children born after 2010—who is already in charge of teaching their parents how to deal with technology.
Ms. Bernschütz talks about “tasks” and “advantages”, which seem to be two fundamental categories to distinguish between our personal and private attitudes to technology and our willingness to be part of it.

Beyond any possible kind of generalization, the reality looks much more complicated: we are all addressed by a sort of ‘collective call’: we all hold a special responsibility in translating our own cultural values into comprehensive statements, devised and conveyed through technological tools. A brilliant example is suggested by the way the performing arts are communicated, today, in the frame of the so-called ‘information society’. On the one hand, the good health of the theatrical system could be evaluated through its capacity in engaging audiences and attracting fresh theatregoers; on the other hand, it would be really hard to detach the virtual communities from the physical ones, that, however, prove to be vivid and tenacious. They underline the very essence of theatricality, the fact that artists and spectators share the same space during the same time.

Mária Bernschütz’s speech, even though deriving from a very specific research sample, was crucial in gaining an impartial view of how different generations of ‘users’ currently deal with the digital environment; and yet, everyone in the room was asked to develop personal insights, trying and locate themselves in this or that generation, becoming part of a sort of ‘common sense’ of participation.
If Generation X is labeled as “very enthusiastic”, responsible for initiating “the revolution” and refusing “strict rules within their working space”, the members of Generation Y “don’t respect the leader’s judgmental language” and are not always able to “find what they are looking for”, locate their own values, establish their connections with other colleagues and “understand how one could actually be ‘disconnected’”. They want trust, and, in this quest, they experience a sort of anxiety. The members of Generation Z are already much more “money-oriented”, because they were “born after the global crisis”. And, by now, they only want to succeed.
It’s not very easy to detect which generation we belong to, until a young man, an honest citizen of the ‘Z-realm’, takes the stage.

As he grabs the microphone, Tamás Trunk definitely looks like the ‘minister’ of Generation Z. He speaks a very good English, with a clear and smart American accent; he handles a remote control to show us a brief yet effective gallery of slides on the wide screen at the rear of the stage; which he doesn’t even look at, but he masters beautifully.
His tone is colloquial, fast, high-pitched, rhythmic and captivating. Tamás Trunk is passionate with sneakers and youngsters’ culture, he’s a ‘professional YouTuber.’ As a matter of fact, he’s an ‘influencer’, and he looks like one, although he doesn’t wear sneakers this particular day, but a fashionable and elegant outfit, laced shoes under a big smile on his face.
He refers to the “grown-ups”, as if he wanted to mark a distance; he himself grew up “globally and digitally”, his generation was the first to be “completely connected”. The easiest impression, he reckons, is that Generation Z can “consume, drink, and eat the same food and beverages and use the same products all over the world.”

Is this what being connected means? Are we actually all the same? Do we really look alike?
“No, this doesn’t mean that we are all the same”, says Trunk. “We are probably the most diverse generation ever. And, yeah, we actually love to show that.”
In the map pictured by Tamás Trunk, the digital world is, in a first place, an opportunity to connect with each other. But the most evident feature is that this connection is guaranteed by the choice of ‘to be or not to be’ affiliated with this or that brand.
If the pioneers of media and Internet studies would draw a line between online and offline world, we all saw those borders being rapidly eroded. The advent of social media, integrated with mobile communication, brought the online realm straight to our palms, and we became more and more dependent on the interface, in order to interact with our daily reality.
Immediacy embraced hypermediacy and the combination of the two gradually generated new layers of reality: hardware and software played together in offering the users a new form of virtual
experience which can no longer be distinguished. As Bolter and Grusin wrote in their seminal essay Remediation, today, “digital hypermedia seek the real by multiplying mediation so as to create a feeling of fullness, a satiety of experience, which can be taken as reality.”

In Trunk’s talk, that reality seems to be based on the opportunity of being part of a network. And yet, it’s surprising how, in his vision, such network is essentially shaped on market logic, based on buying and selling, advertising and branding. “Brand” is, in fact, one of the most frequently used words in the young man’s speech.
One of the slides shows a photo of a group of ‘hippies’ from the Seventies. To the speaker, this is a symbol of revolution, to which he compares a contemporary attitude: “Sometimes I hear that my generation doesn’t want to rebel anymore, that we all just want to be the same, and go with the flow. The reality is that, in this digital world, we don’t rebel against the same things, nor using the same symbols, such as alcohol or drugs.” Brands and fashion seem to offer a new way of provoking social attention and promoting “equality and equal treatment for all of us.”

Trunk’s enthusiasm is contagious, and yet it seems to be irresistibly kneeling to the altar of the Market, understanding Internet and the social media as a way to establish a sort of network of consumers. “Brands want all of us to buy their products and we actually like these companies.” These symbols of “a huge consumer’s world” apparently grant a sense of belonging to the younger generations. “Together,” says Trunk, “we can work a lot and create amazing movements and projects that, we feel, are actually ours.”
Thus, these “digital natives” need certain kinds of “movements” and “brands”, to compose “an amazing community”, able to activate a wide “secondary market”, where very young people can start their own business and, reselling items for “way bigger prizes”, make a lot of money. We are suddenly talking about millions of dollars.
Many of these youngsters don’t connect with each other in real life, and yet, in Trunk’s opinion, “online world is an extension of the real world.”

For the question time, moderated by Gergő Mostis from Kreatív Kolozsvár, also the sociologist Valér Veres is invited to the table. It’s the right moment to reconnect the accurate ‘generational study’ conducted by Mária Bernschütz with Tamás Trunk’s passionate storytelling, that some ways presented a case history of his own generation.
In his book The Virtual Communities (1993), Howard Rheingold thinks of cyberspace “as a social petri dish, the Net as the agar medium, and virtual communities, in all their diversity, as the colonies of microorganisms that grow in petri dishes.”
Rheingold’s metaphorical description of cyberspace is proven to be true when one looks at the technological and rhetorical architecture of social networks. Founded as these are on an individual selection of data to be read and written, they represent very complex instruments in charge of managing a large amount of “information as social and cultural objects”. And yet, the development of citizen journalism, net-art and online activism has demonstrated how strong and effective such kind of connections between users can be.

Mária Bernschütz thoroughly summarized how the “generation gap” is still present, and yet, technological development is a process that has no memory and tends to erase the past. In a couple of decades, the so-called “world” (because also this term should be confronted with a still huge ‘digital divide’) is going to be populated by different generations that will have the exact same relation to technology.
Language, so diverse in its references from speaker to speaker, set the tone for a fugitive imagery. In a digitised world, made of weak ties, language and modes of interaction should be considered as a mind-expanding technology; digital media must then be seen as a physical support for the export of language. In the words of Derrick DeKerckhove, in a system of interconnected and composite competences, “the more the discourse gets decentralized, the deeper is the change in the conventional definitions and relations.”
And this could be a good starting point to compose a new view of the “world”. A world defined by connection and relation, in which, really, no one could possibly consider him/herself a “hermit”.

Published on 16 January 2019