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"The process of ongoing digitization therefore raises radical questions concerning the future of the human cerebral organization."
-Bernard Stiegler1
"Today the postdigital is hegemonic, and as such is entangled with everyday life and experience in a highly complex, messy and difficult to untangle way that is different from previous instantiations of the digital-indeed, the varieties of the digital should be treated as historical in this important sense."
-David M. Berry2
Theatre Journal: 1999
The responses of many practitioners and scholars of theatre and performance studies to the rise of digital culture can be usefully contextualized against Theatre Journal's special issue on "Theatre and Technology" published in December 1999.3 Already in the 1990s, before the special issue was published, the appearance of electronic projections and their resulting mediated subjects in the theatres, galleries, and households of early digital cultures was pervasive. Significant publications in the field of performance and technology also prefigured the Theatre Journal special issue, including Theatre, Theory, Postmodernism (Birringer, 1991), Presence and Resistance (Auslander, 1992), "Televisual Performance: Openness to the Mystery" (Causey, 1994), and The Domain-Matrix (Case, 1996).4 Building on those works, the 1999 special issue, edited by Susan Bennett, worked to establish the key concerns of digital and technologized performance. Practice-based research was explored by Johannes Birringer, computational research methods and visual modeling were documented by Frank Mohler, Christie Carson examined an early example of a CD-ROM digital humanities project, Anja Klöck attempted to historicize the field, while I responded with a theoretical reading. The concerns exercised in the issue represented the growing interest in accessing the new technologies in order to reimagine how performance and scholarship could be advanced, while exploring identities and epistemologies, politics and aesthetics within the larger digital culture. At a fundamental level, what scholars and artists were examining was the technical and theoretical shift from the analog to the digital. Elements of the primary conceptual frameworks at work in theatre and performance studies and practice-the "cerebral organization"5 as Bernard Stiegler puts it-were being repositioned by the growth of digitization and the presence of the networks of virtual environments, leading to the challenging of a solely analog perspective. Using a theatrical metaphor, the conceptual reconfiguration saw the temporal and spatial accuracy of a material stage and proscenium arch...