Abstract
We need machines that suffer from the burden of their memory. Jean-François Lyotard (1991: 22).
This paper addresses the histories of liveness and performance and the life of machines by articulating theoretical positions on Samuel Beckett’s prose work The Lost Ones in relation to a recent new media work UNMAKEABLELOVE (Kenderdine & Shaw 2008). UNMAKEABLELOVE is a revisioning of Beckett’s initial investigation, which focuses and makes interactively tangible a state of confrontation and interpolation between our-selves and another society that is operating in a severe state of physical and psychological entropy. This interactive theatre advances the practices of algorithmic agency, artificial life, virtual communities, human-computer interaction, augmented virtuality, mixed reality and multimedia performance to engage ‘the body’s primordial inscriptions’ (Schwab 2000: 73). Its mixed reality strategies of embodied simulation intricately engage the presence and agency of the viewers and impel them to experience the anomalies of a perceptual disequilibrium that directly implicates them in an alienated and claustrophobic situation. Beckett’s prose has been interpreted by a number of leading scholars, including Lyotard in The Inhuman who speaks of ‘systematic madness’ (Lyotard 1991: 186), Porush who describes Beckett’s ‘cybernetic machine’ and Schwab who interprets The Lost Ones as a kind of ‘soul-making’ (Schwab 2000: 73) and envisions the texts’ narrative agency as ‘a disembodied artificial intelligence’ (ibid. 64) exploring the boundaries between the human and posthuman.
This paper addresses the histories of liveness and performance and the life of machines by articulating theoretical positions on Samuel Beckett’s prose work The Lost Ones in relation to a recent new media work UNMAKEABLELOVE (Kenderdine & Shaw 2008). UNMAKEABLELOVE is a revisioning of Beckett’s initial investigation, which focuses and makes interactively tangible a state of confrontation and interpolation between our-selves and another society that is operating in a severe state of physical and psychological entropy. This interactive theatre advances the practices of algorithmic agency, artificial life, virtual communities, human-computer interaction, augmented virtuality, mixed reality and multimedia performance to engage ‘the body’s primordial inscriptions’ (Schwab 2000: 73). Its mixed reality strategies of embodied simulation intricately engage the presence and agency of the viewers and impel them to experience the anomalies of a perceptual disequilibrium that directly implicates them in an alienated and claustrophobic situation. Beckett’s prose has been interpreted by a number of leading scholars, including Lyotard in The Inhuman who speaks of ‘systematic madness’ (Lyotard 1991: 186), Porush who describes Beckett’s ‘cybernetic machine’ and Schwab who interprets The Lost Ones as a kind of ‘soul-making’ (Schwab 2000: 73) and envisions the texts’ narrative agency as ‘a disembodied artificial intelligence’ (ibid. 64) exploring the boundaries between the human and posthuman.
| Original language | English |
|---|---|
| Title of host publication | Bastard or Playmate? |
| Subtitle of host publication | Adapting Theatre, Mutating Media and Contemporary Performing Arts |
| Editors | David Depestel, Boris Debackere, Robrecht Vanderbeeken, Christel Stalpaert |
| Publisher | Routledge |
| Pages | 102-120 |
| Number of pages | 19 |
| Edition | 1st |
| ISBN (Electronic) | 9781040773345, 9781003691426 |
| ISBN (Print) | 9789089642585 |
| DOIs | |
| Publication status | Published - 6 Apr 2012 |