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Postdigital Performance

Matthew Causey

“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 stud-
ies 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

Matthew Causey is an associate professor and the head of the School of Drama, Film and Music at Trin-
ity College Dublin, where he is the director of the Arts Technology Research Laboratory. He is author of
Theatre and Performance in Digital Culture (2009), and coeditor of The Performing Subject
in the Space of Technology: Through the Virtual Towards the Real (2015) and Performance,
Identity and the Neo-Political Subject (2013). His practice-based research in areas of digital media
and performance include adaptations of Beckett’s television plays . . . but the clouds . . . and Nacht
und Träume.

1 
Bernard Stiegler, “Call for Digital Studies,” Digital Studies (n.d.), available at http://digital-studies.
org/wp/call-for-digital-studies/.
2 
David M. Berry, “The Postdigital Constellation,” in Postdigital Aesthetics: Art, Computation and
Design, ed. David M. Berry and Michael Dieter (Basingstoke, UK: Palgrave Macmillan, 2015), 44–57.
3 
Theatre Journal 51, no. 4 (1999).
4 
Johannes H. Birringer, Theatre, Theory, Postmodernism (Bloomington: Indiana University Press,
1991); Philip Auslander, Presence and Resistance: Postmodernism and Cultural Politics in Contemporary
American Performance (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1992); Matthew Causey, “Televisual
Performance: Openness to the Mystery,” Essays in Theatre / Études Théâtrales 13, no. 1 (1994): 61–71;
Sue-Ellen Case, The Domain-Matrix: Performing Lesbian at the End of Print Culture (Bloomington: Indiana
University Press, 1996).

Theatre Journal 68 (2016) 427–441 © 2016 by Johns Hopkins University Press

428 / Matthew Causey
research was explored by Johannes Birringer, computational research methods and vi-
sual 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 prosce-
nium arch dissolving within a multidimensional and asynchronous virtual environment
and network. Of course, that process is constantly in flux, with movements in either
direction in a process that flows in a continuum.
One primary area of research that arose within theatre and performance studies of
mediatized and digital culture involved the shifting ontologies of performance. The
well-known and oft-rehearsed arguments of Peggy Phelan on the ontology of perfor-
mance and Philip Auslander on liveness were key arguments in a debate over the nature
of performance in collision with media.6 The questions considered were fundamental
ones that pursued issues regarding the structure and function of performance. And
yet, these ontological positions are unsustainable and even inaccurate because they
create binary distinctions among media delivery systems that are challenged in what
I will define below as a postdigital condition. Nonetheless, this supplementary logic of
opposing media ontologies is still rehearsed in many contemporary analyses of the-
atre and performance practice. The translations, or mediators of the binaries, be they
terms like multi-, inter-, or trans-, still construct a logic of the supplement that creates
hierarchies that are irresolvable and false. Intermedial theatre, like multimedia before
and transmedia briefly after, is a thing of the past.
Alongside these ontological concerns in the initial discussions of theatre and per-
formance in digital culture were issues of performing subjectivity in the spaces of
technology and the potential for exploring alternative models of identity. There were
many explorations of technologized models of identity introduced in early cyber theory,
explored through various experiments of performance and technology and experi-
enced through widespread participation in virtual communities. The first generation
of cyber theorists and computer enthusiasts during the 1980s explored the liberating
possibilities of virtual communities with new models of electronic subjectivity. Texts
like Howard Rheingold’s Virtual Communities, Allucquère Rosanne Stone’s The War
of Desire and Technology at the Close of the Mechanical Age, and Cyberspace: First Steps
edited by Michael Benedikt researched the opportunities and challenges to identity
in virtual spaces and extended through technological prosthetics.7 Theatre-makers,

5 
Stiegler, “Call for Digital Studies.”
6 
See Philip Auslander, Liveness: Performance in a Mediatized Culture (Abingdon, UK: Routledge, 2008);
Peggy Phelan, Unmarked: The Politics of Performance (Abingdon, UK: Routledge, 2003).
7 
For further reading on the identity explorations in early electronic communication environments
such as MUDs and MOOs, see Michael Benedikt, ed., Cyberspace: First Steps (Cambridge, MA: MIT
POSTDIGITAL PERFORMANCE / 429

artists, and internet designers/programmers further explored that cultural potential.

Stelarc, perhaps more than any other artist, explored the transhuman transition through
mechanical, computational, and biological prosthetics.8 In a more nuanced and far less
utopic manner, the dispersion of the subject was represented and articulated in works
like the Wooster Group’s Frank Dell’s The Temptation of St. Anthony (1987) that can be
read as a performance of the ecstasy of the mediated body, an “ontological-hysteric”
theatre of techno-performativity and a manic release from material boundaries.9 Virtual
environments—MUDs, MOOs, and later Second Life—offered mass access to virtual
communities and avatar identities and increased the potential for challenging tradi-
tional models of identity.10 And yet, these models of a potentially liberated subject in
the space of technology, like the questions concerning performance ontology, are now
more problematic than ever. The discoveries and innovations of these performative- and
internet-based exercises are altered within a reification of the ideology of a neoliberal
electronic capitalism wherein the individual, or data subject, is digitally duplicated as a
singular and unified producer, product, and consumer in service to the virtual economy
(Facebook, Twitter, Google, and so on). The ontological issues and strategies of virtual
identities, and the politics of the electronic subject, are significantly altered in this
system of digitized consumers and markets in the nonplaces of virtual environments.
In response to these initial ontological and subject/identity questions, I developed
the thesis of my essay for the Theatre Journal special issue, “Screen Test of the Double:
The Uncanny Performer in the Space of Technology,”11 from Avital Ronell’s readings
of Freud and Heidegger in The Telephone Book.12 I argued that the mediated doubles in
live performance could be read as uncanny.13 I drew on the notion of the uncanny to
indicate something unsettling, something other, some “harbinger of death” as Freud put
it, in the form of the self seeing the self seeing the self in an infinite mise en abyme.14
There was plenty of evidence to support this claim in the form of the performance
works by the Wooster Group and the many popular films of the time, including Wag
the Dog (Levinson, 1997), Pleasantville (Ross, 1998), and The Truman Show (Weir, 1998),
which all played on the anxiety of encroaching mediated simulations and the loss of
individual autonomy and a reliable sense of reality.15 I wrote that “the video image is
more real than the live actor” (389). My argument, drawing on Lacanian theory, was

Press, 1991); Howard Rheingold, The Virtual Community: Homesteading on the Electronic Frontier (Boston:
Addison-Wesley, 1993); and Allucquère Rosanne Stone, The War of Desire and Technology at the Close of
the Mechanical Age (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1995).
8 
For more on Stelarc, see www.stelarc.org.
9 
For further information on the Wooster Group, see Andrew Quick, The Wooster Group Work Book
(Abingdon, UK: Routledge, 2007).
10 
See Tom Boellstorff, Coming of Age in Second Life: An Anthropologist Explores the Virtually Hu-
man (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2008).
11 
Matthew Causey, “Screen Test of the Double: The Uncanny Performer in the Space of Technology,”
Theatre Journal 51, no. 4 (1999): 383–94.
12 
Avital Ronell, The Telephone Book: Technology–Schizophrenia–Electric Speech (Lincoln: University of
Nebraska Press, 1989).
13 
Alice Rayner’s “Technology and Narratives of Identity” seminar at Stanford University in 1992
brought this and many other readings on the subject to my attention and remains an important re-
source in my research.
14 
Sigmund Freud, “The Uncanny,” in The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund
Freud, vol. 17 (1917–1919): An Infantile Neurosis and Other Works, trans. and ed. James Strachey, in col-
laboration with Anna Freud (London: Hogarth Press and the Institute of Psychoanalysis, 1955), 217–56.
15 
For further reading on the Wooster Group and the issues raised in this essay, see Causey, “Tele-
visual Performance.”
430 / Matthew Causey
to suggest that the negation of the solidified subject via its separation or transference
to the screens made clear the fabrication of the subject, its realness laying in its vide-
ated nothingness, its absence.
The utopic Nietzschean reach of my essay was to imagine a witnessing or participa-
tion in the obliteration of the solidified subject—dispersed, dismembered, undergoing
this sparagmos toward a constant state of becoming, becoming-machine, approaching
the posthuman. In a manner both Nietzschean and Deleuzean, I theorized that the
electronically transposed and dispersed subject in the space of technology embodied
a rejection of subjectivication and signification opposing the organizing principles
that structure identity. And yet, this transformative narrative is challenged from a
contemporary perspective. Rather than the freedom from the principle of individuation
that Nietzsche considers to be at the root of the strife between the Apollonian and the
Dionysian in The Birth of Tragedy16 or the potential of a “body without organs” that
Deleuze and Guattari design in Anti-Oedipus and elsewhere,17 it seems as if now, in a
postdigital context, a more intense though limited model of identity is being performed.
Derrida argues in his essay “The Theater of Cruelty and Closure of Representation” that
Artaud’s theory of the endings of representation and the performance of immediacy
in the Theatre of Cruelty is itself cancelled or voided by an always-already reopening
of the representational field and its perceiving subject’s hermeneutic compulsion. At
the point at which art might create an event experienced as beyond representation,
the representational field appears as the support on which that event is perceived.
Being beyond representation is inconceivable in Derrida’s argument.18 Similarly, any
dismembered technological subject, whether in general culture or enacted on the stage,
reasserts its position with an electronic identity, now with an insatiable, rabid social
hunger seeking acknowledgment and acceptance, more insistent and insurmountable
than ever, now strengthened by its infinite virtual duplications. The more diverse identi-
ties become within social-media systems and electronic commerce and computational
surveillance, the more identifiable the subject becomes. The computational algorithms
of visibility, location tracking, and consumption histories create a more specific target
of the individual. The dispersion of the subject via avatar transference and multiple
performed identities within hybrid and virtual environments serves not to release the
subject from the strictures of individuation, but to strengthen the representations of
identity in an ever sharpening focus of electronic commerce. The more any subject can
be identified, isolated, and targeted, the more successfully can a market be designed
for their consumption, as we witness throughout electronic commerce such as Amazon
or Google or, for that matter, much of the internet.19
Thus the situation is that within a postdigital context, the ontologies of the perfor-
mance and media converge and are experienced as less uncanny and more familiar,
less discrete and autonomous phenomena, and understood as a flow, a becoming, and

16 
For further discussion of the principle of individuation, see Friedrich Nietzsche, The Birth of Tragedy
and the Case of Wagner, trans. Walter Kaufmann (New York: Vintage, 1967).
17 
For further readings on the “body without organs,” see Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, Anti-
Oedipus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia, trans. Robert Hurley, Mark Seem, and Helen R. Lane (Minneapolis:
University of Minnesota Press, 1977).
18 
Jacques Derrida, “The Theater of Cruelty and the Closure of Representation,” Theater 9, no. 3
(1978): 6–19.
19 
For further readings on the topic of self-surveillance, see Sarah Bay-Cheng, “’When This You See’:
The (Anti) Radical Time of Mobile Self-Surveillance,” Performance Research 19, no. 3 (2014): 48–55.
POSTDIGITAL PERFORMANCE / 431

always in process. Within a postdigital context, the subject positions and identity mod-
els existing in the spaces of technology are less imagined as unrestricted disembodied
beings and more as vulnerable and aggressively commodified entities within electronic
economies and marketplaces. Within a postdigital context, artists conversant with the
language and conceptual frameworks of the digital are thinking digitally in order to
respond, engage, and critique the systems of control inherent in the omnipresent net-
works. If the notions of an unconstrained technologized subject as theorized in early
cyber theory gave rise to ontological and aesthetic questions regarding the nature of
performance and performativity, then there is a contemporary postdigital subjectivity
that draws on performance as an apparatus to resist the systems of control.
So if these suppositions and assertions are true, then what is the postdigital?

Postdigital Performance (and Thinking Digitally)

The term postdigital is both derided and engaged in equal measure, and is often
linked to the discussions and practices of the New Aesthetics and post-internet art. New
Aesthetics, as articulated by James Bridle and debated in the book New Aesthetics, New
Anxieties, links computational imagery within the representations of the everyday with
a blending of the virtual and the real.20 The root of hybridity in the New Aesthetics is
key to the postdigital, which “seize[s] on a hybridized approach towards the digital
and non-digital, finding characteristics of one within the other, deliberately mixing up
processes of making things discrete, calculable, indeed and automated in unorthodox
ways.”21 Regarding post-internet art, Karen Archey and Robin Peckham write that
“post-internet refers not to a time ‘after’ the internet, but rather to an internet state
of mind—to think in the fashion of the network. In the context of artistic practice, the
category of the post-internet describes an art object created with a consciousness of the
networks within which it exists, from conception and production to dissemination and
reception.”22 Thinking in the fashion of the digital and the network and the strategies
of hybridity as represented in the New Aesthetics and post-internet art are the key
components that distinguish what I am terming postdigital performance.
A recent collection of essays, Postdigital Aesthetics: Art, Computation and Design (edited
by David Berry and Michael Dieter), draws out multiple meanings of the expression.
Aspects of the postdigital outlined in the essays include the pervasive presence of the
digital in everyday life, new conceptual maps figured on the language of new media
and digitization, hybridity between the digital and the analog, and accelerationism. This
assemblage of ideas revolves on the hegemony of the digital as the primary model of
conceptualizing and engaging the world, rethinking the analog and the real in terms
of the digital and the virtual and back again. The postdigital is not a retrograde Lud-
dite motion, but a progressive leftist inclination that can be understood in terms of the
contemporary theory of accelerationism, which promotes the idea that the “only radical

20 
For further information on the New Aesthetic, see http://new-aesthetic.tumblr.com/about; and the
electronic text by David M. Berry et al., New Aesthetic, New Anxieties, available on the Lab for the
Unstable Media website at http://v2.nl/publishing/new-aesthetic-new-anxieties.
21 
David M. Berry and Michael Dieter, “Thinking Postdigital Aesthetics: Art, Computation and De-
sign,” in Postdigital Aesthetics, 6.
22 
Karen Archey and Robin Peckham, “Art Post-Internet,” available at http://ucca.org.cn/en/exhibition/
art-post-internet/.
432 / Matthew Causey
political response to capitalism is not to protest, disrupt, critique, or détourne it, but to
accelerate and exacerbate its uprooting, alienating, decoding, abstractive tendencies.”23
My own model of the postdigital is conversant with these varied definitions and
considers the situation as such of a postdigital culture to be that of a social system fully
familiarized and embedded in electronic communications and virtual representations,
wherein the biological and the mechanical, the virtual and the real, and the organic
and the inorganic approach indistinction. Of course, subjects in postdigital cultures are
not post or past anything concerning their “entanglements” with machines, networks,
and electronic communications.24 The prefix of post- linked to the internet, digital, inter-
medial, and even the human is, in fact, a recognition of the overdetermined relations,
circulations, and exchanges of those phenomena within the current condition—not
an endpoint, but a recognition of the many flows and distributions. A posthuman is a
human, all too human, who attempts to negotiate its humanness through its animality
and materiality in relation to the community and other entities, be they organic or other-
wise. Artists and researchers of postdigital culture are fully embedded in the aesthetics
and ideology of the digital and its codes of control, configurations of temporal and
spatial organizations, and structures of identity. Therefore within postdigital cultures,
the strategies for effective historical analysis, social critique, and art practice require
new configurations that take into account the modalities and affects of the digital,
regardless of the use or appearance of technology within the work. Artists like Ryan
Trecartin and Lizzie Fitch and the various forms of postdigital performance practice
that draw on the modalities of the digital, whether or not they are computational or
analog, technological or organic—for which I include forms that are immersive, hy-
brid, and virtual—are discussed below. Drawing on the discourse of the digital, these
contemporary works can be understood as thinking digitally, embodying an activist
strategy of critique within and against postdigital culture’s various ideological and
economic strategies of control, alienation, and self-commodification (fig. 1).
Postdigital performance incorporates the discourse and ideologies of the digital, and
questions the significant issues involved in negotiating being in a postdigital culture
while working toward effective political engagements. Performance works that draw
on the structures and strategies of the digital, whether analog, digital, or hybrid, are
potentially well-positioned and programed to engage the challenges of devising resistant
forms of contemporary performance. The structural elements and logic of the digital that
are being incorporated into performance include, but are not limited to, asynchronic-
ity and multidimensionality, the transmedial and trans-identities, bugs and glitches,
malware and hacking, copy and paste, and the reality of the virtual. The incorporation
of these phenomena into performance practice is to think digitally, returning the system
back against itself. A postdigital performance thinks digitally in order to resist, or at
least understand, the systems of electronic and computational control. And yet, the
incorporation of this mode of representation or cerebral organization is not contingent
on any particular technological interface—or any technological interface whatsoever.
As described above, one exercise of the critical theory and practice of early digital
performance was to think through the uncanny and slow collapse of the live and the
23 
Robin Mackay and Arvan Avanessian, eds., #Accelerate: The Accelerationist Reader (Falmouth, UK:
Urbanomic, 2014).
24 
Chris Salter, Entanglements: Technology and the Transformation of Performance (Cambridge, MA: MIT
Press, 2010).
POSTDIGITAL PERFORMANCE / 433

Figure 1. Lizzie Fitch and Ryan Trecartin, Retreatery Butte (2016). A unique sculptural theatre
exhibiting Ryan Trecartin, Mark Trade (single-channel HD video). Components: bar tables, bar
stools, custom rock seats, park grills, fire rings, carpet, paint, lighting, and ambient sound. Original
installation dimensions: 157 x 331.5 x 233.5 in. (398.8 x 842 x 593.1 cm). Installation view at Andrea
Rosen Gallery, New York City, March 19 through April 20, 2016. (Image courtesy of Regen Projects,
Los Angeles and Andrea Rosen Gallery, New York City, copyright © Lizzie Fitch and Ryan
Trecartin.)

technological. By extension, contemporary postdigital artists converse in the language

and discourse of the digital, and engage a strategic application of aesthetic frames that
replicate the digital and its constant state of connectivity and networked structures
in order to draw on its potential for radical models of identity, culture, and commu-
nity formation. As Robert Venturi advised architects in the 1970s to “learn from Las
Vegas,” artists and scholars of the postdigital period are learning from the internet.25
One can read, in the hybrid, immersive, and virtual postdigital performance works
that incorporate the ecosystem of the digital, a process of advancing aesthetic and con-
ceptual schemes past the terms of a proscenium, past the televisual, now digital, now
networked, toward a state of becoming postdigital, post-internet, and post-network.
While acknowledging that I do not hold the answer to what it is to actually engage
in thinking, much less digital or networked thinking, I can nonetheless point to what
I claim are significant components or modalities of the affects of the digital now in-
corporated in a postdigital aesthetic context. These include:

25 
Venturi’s research is often credited as an influence in the origins of postmodernist practice and
aesthetics. To “learn from Las Vegas” was to acknowledge the primacy of the sign or the signified as
represented on the Vegas strip, where gigantic neon signs revealed banal structures. See Robert Venturi,
Denise Scott Brown, and Steven Izenour, Learning from Las Vegas (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1972).
434 / Matthew Causey
• Asynchronous time registers and multidimensional spatial configurations
The structures of asynchronous time registers and multidimensionality are models
almost commonplace in modernist aesthetics, with obvious examples being cubism and
futurism. Modernist notions of representation and subjectivity were directly influenced
as a result of the shifts in the perception of time and space created through technolo-
gies such as the camera or the car. What digital technologies afford is a flexibility and
usability that allows users the ability to reorder various virtual models and inhabit and
perform their identities and “lived experiences” within those spaces.
• Replication and simulation rather than traditional representational models
To represent is to interpret, perform, and transform the thing represented, while to replicate
is to double, duplicate, and mechanically reproduce the thing without alteration and
interpretation. The digital copy of the original is another original, an identical replica-
tion. This model of mechanical reproduction is the means by which digital technologies
permit construction and duplication of the network, and it is this different model of
reproduction that you see appropriated in the postdigital art practices described below.
• Networked interconnectivity and the transmedial
Rather than drawing a distinction of “thinking digitally,” I may have more correctly
suggested to think as the network. It is the data structures of networks that define so much
of the relations of power and communication in contemporary postdigital cultures. The
digital may be the means and the network is the system. It is the phenomenon of radi-
cal interconnectivity that acts as the substructure of network and postdigital cultures.
Transmedial artworks, video games, political and advertising campaigns that operate
across multiple media, and live and mediated communication platforms exemplify this
modality.
• Bugs and glitches
The bug as a technical error and the glitch as a momentary fault in the system operate
as ghosts in the machine that allow chance computational and electronic phenomena
to appear and participate in structure of the work. What is at play is an aesthetic of
failure, disruption, noise, and interference that promotes spontaneity and randomness.
• Trans-identities
Trans- and queer identities are well-established as models of performing the self that
are states of becoming outside of traditional ordering systems, biological imperatives,
or binary restrictions. These new models of a posthuman identity find an analog in the
technologies of virtual avatars that exhibit a radical mutability in electronic duplica-
tions.
• The reality of the virtual
The reality of the virtual is perhaps the most complex of these articulated modalities
of the digital, but it indicates that the binaries of the biological and the virtual, the
organic and the inorganic, the machine and the flesh, and specifically the virtual and
the real are no longer useful in conceptualizing and performing within a postdigital
culture. Those categories are recognizable and still inform reason and logic, but are
increasingly active in zones of indistinction as indiscernible phenomena.
• Copy and paste
Closely related to the processes of replication and simulation, copy and paste is the
most mundane, banal, prevalent, and influential of the strategies of the digital. The
capacity (or is it a compulsion?) to point, click, drag, copy, and paste are the keystroke
patterns that constitute the signature aesthetic and cerebral organization of the post-
digital. Again, we can see the precedence that was set in modernist aesthetics, in this
case, by Andy Warhol and his many appropriated and duplicated images.

These thumbnail descriptors of various digital affects introduce the language of

computer programing and require expansion and their own discrete area of research.
They will raise more questions for the reader than answers, but contemporary art-
ists working in the fields of post-internet and postdigital art nonetheless routinely
engage them. Such artists include Fitch and Trecartin, whose videos, installations,
and performance works embody an unsettling complexity of internet trans-identities,
asynchronous and multidimensional digital spaces, and cryptic narratives that pres-
POSTDIGITAL PERFORMANCE / 435

ent accurate replications and simulations of the subject in postdigital culture.26 In

the press release to their recent solo show at the Andrea Rosen Gallery in New York
City, the artists refer to their own work as “sculptural theatre.” The exhibition at the
gallery presents these sculptural theatres as a network of interconnecting installation
spaces designed for spectators to engage, sit, or recline, watching video projections
with audio tracks accessed via headphones. The spaces are populated with large seat-
ing units that suggest natural, although highly stylized environments. The figures in
the films appear more as animated avatars than human representations and speak
through pitch-shifting technologies, wear Day-Glo makeup, reflective contact lens,
neon-colored wigs, and are at times washed out under black lights or filmed with
low-light filters within a color palette that is unnatural, brash, and computerized.
The narratives unfold as durational exercises of endurance suggesting or simulating
meaning and experience, but also holding these events in abeyance. What happens is
not happening. Multiple frames, jump cuts, and loops create a vertiginous effect. The
logic of the digital is at play (fig. 2).
The works of Fitch and Trecartin are described in part as post-perspectival cinema
and often categorized as post-internet or postdigital, but certainly hybrid in that they
exhibit formal categories of immersive theatre and live art, video art, performance,
and installation. Lisa Åkervall writes of their installation work SITE VISIT, presented
at the KW Institute for Contemporary Art in Berlin in 2014, that

[a] post-cinematic attitude can be traced throughout its various strategies: its critical mim-
icking of domestic conditions of reception, its unrelenting experiential fragmentation, its
emphasis on warped sound emissions and sonic primacy, its insistent display of excess,
its accelerated speed, its aggressive medial intertextuality, its multiperspectivity, and its
incessant exhibitionism.27

The event of SITE VISIT, like the Rosen Gallery exhibition, is laid out through multiple
rooms lined and shaped through set and sonic design, with video projections on ceil-
ings, walls, and floors depicting characters and narratives dispersed in a media excess
of digital narcissism. The form is pure hybridity, with the hierarchies of image, sound,
and liveness upended. The ecstasy of electronic communication and the manipula-
tion and endless duplications of self are realized in a work that is not one singular,
autonomous, or discrete entity (installation, performance, video, sound), unless that
entity is, simply, the digital. In response to the narrative elements of the various film
segments, Kevin McGarry, in the gallery’s press release, wrote that

[i]t’s creepy, haunted, a vacuum of pretending that often reverberates as uncanny, which
heightens the disconcerting feeling of being temporally located “after” something world-
changing, without any indication of precisely what that might be, or even if that “some-
thing” is real at all, and not a video game-like premise, with no connection to the causal
relationships of actual time. Characters seem to appreciate solitude as luxury, a remnant from
societies of overstimulation. Their purgatories become pleasurable recreational zones—being
stuck becomes a platform for practicing stunts, for squandering their human thresholds.28

26 
For further information on the work of Fitch and Trecartin, see Lisa Åkervall, “Networked Selves:
Ryan Trecartin and Lizzie Fitch’s Postcinematic Aesthetics,” Screen 57, no. 1 (2016): 35–51.
27 
Lisa Åkervall, “McMansion of Media Excess: Ryan Trecartin’s and Lizzie Fitch’s SITE VISIT,”
NECSUS: European Journal of Media Studies (June 12, 2015), available at http://www.necsus-ejms.org/
mcmansion-of-media-excess-ryan-trecartins-and-lizzie-fitchs-site-visit/.
28 
Kevin McGarry, “Lizzie Fitch / Ryan Trecartin: March 19–April 20, 2016, Main Gallery,” press
release, Andrea Rosen Gallery, New York City, available at http://www.andrearosengallery.com/exhibitions/
lizzie-fitch-ryan-trecartin_2016-03-19/1/press-release.
436 / Matthew Causey

Figure 2. Ryan Trecartin, Mark Trade (2016) (single-channel HD video, 1:13:30). (Image courtesy of
Regen Projects, Los Angeles and Andrea Rosen Gallery, New York City, copyright © Ryan Trecartin.)

It is interesting that McGarry uses the term uncanny here, which challenges my
model of a not-so-uncanny postdigital subject. In the works of Fitch and Trecartin, the
uncanniness resides not in a subject seeing itself see itself and partaking in its own
disappearance, as I described in earlier digital-culture performance and film. Rather, it
is a subject after the fact, immersed and embedded, in the space of technology where
experience itself is always obstructed by a “fear of being,” as Fitch notes in the press
release.
The work simulates, or hints at, a transitional phase of “after the digital” in which
the subjects remain in a state of isolation. To follow my model of thinking digitally,
the simulations and replications of the world of Fitch and Trecartin are presented in
multidimensional rooms and environments projecting asynchronous, multiple video
events of narratives told through a liquidity of identity articulated within the reality
of the virtuality. The glitches and bugs of the system are a structural and narrativizing
element. The works hack the forms of film, installation, sculpture, and theatre in a
malicious manner that in turn creates its own unique form. The world replicated, or
copied and pasted, in Fitch and Trecartin’s work is this “after something,” as described
by McGarrry. I would use the term after- or postdigital, inhabiting and at home in the
reality of the virtual.

Immersive, Augmented, Transmedial

Contemporary performance systems as diverse as immersive theatre, augmented reali-
ties, pervasive games, and new models of spectatorships in streaming and web-based
media further demonstrate the functions and processes of a postdigital performance and
some of the manners of thinking digitally. They include the work of immersive theatre
companies, such as ANU Productions in Ireland, that incorporate a digital aesthetic via
the rearrangements of the temporal/spatial configuration of the audiences’ experience,
POSTDIGITAL PERFORMANCE / 437

hybridizing intimate and live encounters with performance in nontraditional spaces

and alternative narrative designs.29 Part of the motivation for many of the examples of
the 1960s environmental theatre (Grotowski and Schechner, among others ), which was
its own immersive theatre form, was toward increasing interactions between audience
and performer. Contemporary immersive theatres further this strategy by devising a
reordering of the theatre proper, incorporating the local environment’s spatial and
social history. For example, ANU’s four-part Monto Cycle was an encounter based
on and performed within a quarter-mile-wide environment in the center of Dublin,
representing a hundred years of history. The individual performance works, including
Laundry, The Boys of Foley Street, and Vardo (all presented at the Dublin Theatre Festival
in, respectively, 2011, 2012, and 2014), were brilliant historical and critical reflections
of inner-city Dublin cultures of institutional abuses of Church and state, the scourge
of drug dependency, and issues of contemporary immigration articulated through
mobile (spatial and temporal) representational systems. Not only was there a concern
for the politics of the communities in question, but also a transparent intimacy devel-
oped through new relations to the performance spaces. The history and places of the
people of this local environment were appropriated; in a sense they were digitized
and data-mined and recalled (or duplicated and replicated) as a database to reveal
and deconstruct the ideologies and affects of those events and times. “Conceptually
digitized,” of course, not literally digitized so that subsequent historical periods, be
they the system of brothels, or the environments of the Magdalene laundries, or the
streets of the drug cultures or current immigrants, were layered over the actual locales
in a multidimensional and asynchronous network. Brian Singleton writes that

[t]he result is a spatialization of otherness in a society where a particular community, such

as that of The Monto, had been wiped out of social consciousness given its history of
prostitution (in its brothels), its industrial incarceration of the challenges to a virile brand
of morality (in its laundry), and its playground for drug barons (its streets and flats). Each
performance collapsed time to the point where the past was clearly in the performative
present, and pointed to how successive policies of regeneration and renewal actively ac-
celerated the descent into further destruction for the community.30

The presentation here of historical replication in a manner of a digital reproduction

enacted within the temporal/spatial structure of live performance is an example of
post-internet theatre in which a computer is nowhere in sight, exemplifying the in-
corporation of the digital in processes of representation with or without technology
or a postdigital performance.
The use of mixed and augmented realities in works like Operation Black Antler (2016)31
and Uncle Roy All Around You (2003)32 by Blast Theory and Bordergame (2015)33 by the

29 
Other significant immersive theatre companies using similar performance strategies include the
Woodshed Collective in the United States and the UK’s Punchdrunk.
30 
Brian Singleton, “Politicizing Performance: ANU Productions and Site-Specific Theater,” Breac: A
Digital Journal of Irish Studies (July 10, 2014), available at https://breac.nd.edu/articles/48940-politicizing-
performance-anu-productions-and-site-specific-theater/.
31 
For more information on Blast Theory’s production of Operation Black Antler, see http://www.blast-
theory.co.uk/projects/operation-black-antler/.
32 
For more information on Blast Theory’s production of Uncle Roy All Around You, see http://www.
blasttheory.co.uk/projects/uncle-roy-all-around-you/.
33 
For more information on the National Theatre of Wales and its production of Bordergame, see https://
nationaltheatrewales.org/bordergame-online.
438 / Matthew Causey
National Theatre of Wales draws spectators to participatory events that are as much
virtual as live and explore a hybrid space of bio-virtuality.34 These works, in particular
Uncle Roy All Around You and Bordergame, are “pervasive games,” which means that
they extend from computer networks and online communications to the real world.
Blast Theory describes Uncle Roy All Around You as “[a] game in which online and street
players collaborate to find Uncle Roy before being invited to make a commitment to a
stranger. Players explore a mixed reality city and collaborate to find Uncle Roy’s office
before being invited to make a year-long commitment to a total stranger.”35 Operation
Black Antler “is an immersive theatre piece that invites you to enter the murky world
of undercover surveillance and question the morality of state-sanctioned spying. . . .
[Y]ou are given a new identity as part of a small team; you are briefed and then sent
into an undercover operation.”36 Bordergame has a similar structure:

Live Bordergame players will attempt, illegally, to cross the border from Bristol [England]
into Newport [Wales], without arousing the suspicions of the Border Agency of the Au-
tonomous Republic of Cymru (BAARC). Meanwhile, online players will register as Active
Citizens of the Autonomous Republic, watch the live players’ journeys, manipulate their
experiences and even determine their fate.37

Both the audience and the performers participate on a variety of levels, from virtual
spectator to real performer.
In such works, the blending of the virtual and the real is enacted and embodied
through the obvious technological enhancements of head-mounted displays, GPS-
activated handheld devices, and internet-based interactivity. However, the bio-virtuality
is extended into the structure of the performances themselves, which take place across
virtual environments mapped onto actual locations in which the tracking technologies
scan and track performers and audiences. These works not only use the technologies of
the digital, but also draw on the representational systems of the digital itself, whether
or not they are techno-based or organic. The exchange between the modalities of the
electronic and the live, and the interconnectivity and transmediality of the pervasive
game structure, present a common apprehension of the world via a position that is
simultaneously multi-modal, live, and digitized.
It is important to recognize not only the new conceptual models of postdigital
performance, but also the changes to spectatorship and audience formation observed
in the binge-watching phenomenon of streaming media programming. The Sopranos
(HBO, 1999–2007), The Wire (HBO, 2002–08), and Breaking Bad (AMC, 2008–13) are
representative of the multi-season programs often watched in extended viewing ses-
sions in a techno-performative immersion. The choices available make for new models
of viewership in which the individual audience member selects location and timings,
allowing for the construction of a broadcast network of one programing for a spectator-
ship of the self. Perhaps this type of electronic variability and choice is not possible in
a live setting, but the influence is present nonetheless in contemporary performance.

34 
For more on mixed realities and performance, see Steve Benford and Gabriella Giannachi, Perform-
ing Mixed Reality (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2011).
35 
Blast Theory, Uncle Roy All Around You.
36 
Blast Theory, Operation Black Antler.
37 
National Theatre of Wales, “National Theatre of Wales Announce Fully Interactive Online and
Live Production,” available at https://www.nationaltheatrewales.org/news/bordergame/national-theatre-wales-
announce-fully-interactive-online-and-live-production.
POSTDIGITAL PERFORMANCE / 439

In her essay “The Spectatorial Body in Multimedia Performance,” Jennifer Parker-

Starbuck reviews several important works that were shown at the London Interna-
tional Festival of Theatre in 2010, including Gob Squad’s Revolution Now! and Rimini
Protokol’s Best Before.38 These works directly engage in the structures and gaming of
computational interactivity. In televisual circumstances, the interconnected spectator
is linked to multiple web-based, information and entertainment networks, comment-
ing and interacting. This transmedial spectator apprehends the object from multiple,
asynchronous, and simultaneous perspectives. The subject and the perceived object in
this phenomenological exchange are afforded altered positions and engage with new
models of perception. The theatre as represented in works such as Revolution Now! and
Best Before is devising aesthetics around these new models of the transmedial spectator.
Finally, regarding these examples of postdigital performance, be they immersive,
augmented, transmedial, or installation, what seems most identifiable is the structure
of hybridity, which incorporates an expanded sense of self, time, and space.39 If this
is true, then the area of research of theatre and performance studies has once again
been extended greatly, well past the theatre, as has long been the case, but to a techno-
performativity that involves all the fields of performance and the aesthetics of the
digital. If our understanding of performance includes the techno-performative and
the boundaries and ontologies of media and performance are indistinct, what is it we
are experiencing as performance from within a postdigital context?

A Postdigital, Accelerating Afterthought (from Mr. Robot)

As argued by Stiegler in his three-part study Technics and Time, by bequeathing
memory to machines, the data-subjects of postdigital culture are engulfed in consum-
erist technical systems and risk losing the capacity for critique, and what is at risk is
the capacity for historical reflection. Our historical consciousness is not always readily
available within a postdigital culture wherein “mnemo-technologies” are the privileged
repository of memory—memory being the affect of history.40 As Sophie Fuggle has
argued, advanced mnemo-technologies “not only store but also generate and organize
information, resulting in the ‘structural loss of memory’ and the ‘control of knowledge’
by these technologies, which include such devices as televisions and computers.”41 These
mnemo-technologies supplement human memory with machinic recall and storage,
and challenge the effective use of the critical tools of memory, historical analysis, and
critique. These shifts all indicate a drift toward an understanding of the embedded
nature of the digital and its systems of control, and an interest in articulating a critique
and resistance to that situation. Fuggle also writes that

[a]s the processes of reading and writing together with the information produced and
stored by such processes are increasingly transferred to machines, the cognitive functions

38 
Jennifer Parker-Starbuck, “The Spectatorial Body in Multimedia Performance,” Performing Arts
Journal 99 (33, no. 3) (2011): 60–71.
39 
For more on Deleuze’s theory of becoming and contemporary art, see Burcu Baykan, “Into the Body
of Another: Strange Couplings and Unnatural Alliances of Harlequin Coat,” in The Performing Subject in
the Space of Technology: Through the Virtual, Towards the Real, ed. Matthew Causey, Emma Meehan, and
Néill O’Dwyer (Basingstoke, UK: Palgrave Macmillan, 2015), 17–33.
40 
See Bernard Stiegler, Technics and Time: The Fault of Epimetheus, vol. 1 (Stanford, CA: Stanford
University Press, 1998).
41 
Sophie Fuggle, “Stiegler and Foucault: The Politics of Care and Self-Writing,” in Stiegler and Tech-
nics, ed. Christina Howells and Gerald Moore (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2013), 193.
440 / Matthew Causey
once required to perform such tasks are displaced, contributing to an impoverishment of
the mind and a subservience to technology that Stiegler describes in terms of widespread
cretinisation, or what he often refers to as “bestialisation.”42

Thinking digitally is a way toward a reengagement of memory and a strategy to re-

flect historically and critically about being, identity, and subjectivity in postdigital
cultures. The hybrid and immersive performance works of Fitch and Trecartin, ANU
Productions, Blast Theory, and the National Theatre of Wales, along with new audi-
ence collectivity via streaming media, are incorporating a manner that is post-internet,
post-technological, and postdigital.
However, maybe it is not that hopeful; maybe it is something else; maybe it is
that this historical fascination with all things technological has been scrubbed clean;
maybe it was inevitable for the affects of the seemingly adventurous early works of
cyber culture—from the inclusion of the Portapak portable video recorder in Fluxus
performance works to the holograms of dead rap artists projected in a live festival
setting—to end up eviscerated in an unnoticed or “un-liked” Facebook post or a search
on Pinterest of #experimental, #theatreandperformance, #technology. So many trans-
gressions are quickly absorbed by the culture in order to circumvent and short-circuit
any event (for example, the potential of new technologized identities argued above)
from taking place, and instead staging the recurring nonevent as the simulacra of a
postdigital culture. So whatever transgressiveness lay in this performative linkage of
being and technology, this also has passed.
I contend that within a postdigital culture, any notion of a virtual, televisual, or post-
organic theatre is redundant terminology, in that theatre and performance in digital
cultures cannot not be these things; it would be similar to naming current performance
practices as electric theatre or live theatre. Of course it is electric, it is certainly live,
and the phenomena of a postdigital culture are likewise the indivisible elements of
contemporary representations, be they virtual, digital, hybrid, mediated, cinematic, or
televisual. It is unimportant to worry over what technology is used onstage or within
any aesthetic exercise—digital, analog, holographic, or naked presence. Now, the ques-
tion resides not in the type or aesthetic use of technology, but in learning to think like
a machine, digitally, or risk obsolescence. Therefore the transition I am picturing is a
move away from the uncanny performer solipsistically coming face to face with its
own perception of seeing oneself see oneself, toward a more fundamental encounter, an
even more unsettling event: seeing oneself as no longer just human, but in a position
as posthuman, becoming machine and thinking digitally. The situation shifts from a
narcissism of uncanniness as witnessed in the exploration of the self in early video art
(for example, that of Vito Acconci) and toward a negotiation of new models of identity
and community as represented in the postdigital performances above.43
But for all the calculating and accounting of the theory and aesthetics of theatre and
performance in digital and postdigital culture, there remain the realities of the many
social injustices and inequities within the fields of electronic commerce and communi-
cation. Real labor and real bodies manufacture and sustain the reality of the virtual. It
is the character of the disenchanted hacker Elliot, in the broadcast and now-streaming
television series Mr. Robot, who in a therapy session sums up the millennial attitude
I am dancing around:

42 
Ibid. (emphasis in original).
43 
See Rosalind Krauss, “Video: The Aesthetics of Narcissism,” in October 1 (spring 1976): 51–64.
POSTDIGITAL PERFORMANCE / 441

Therapist: What is about society that disappoints you so much?

Elliot: Oh, I don’t know. Is it that we collectively thought Steve Jobs was a great man,
even when we knew he made billions off the backs of children? Or maybe it’s
that it feels like all our heroes are counterfeit? The world itself is just one big
hoax, spamming each other with our burning commentary bullshit, masquer-
ading as insight; our social media faking this intimacy. Or is it that we voted
for this? Not with our rigged elections, but with our things, our property, our
money. I’m not saying anything new, we all know why we do this, not because
Hunger Games books make us happy, but because we want to be sedated. Be-
cause, it’s painful not to pretend, because we’re cowards. Fuck society.
(The therapist asks Elliot why he is not speaking, and it is clear to the viewer that
Elliot’s soliloquy was not uttered, but exists only his head.)
Therapist: Elliot, you’re not saying anything. What’s wrong?
Elliot: Nothing.44

Mr. Robot’s narrative depicts the widespread affects and disaffection of digitization
within postdigital culture, and the transformation of conceptual frameworks and the
manners in which individuals through economics and social connections are controlled.
In sympathy with Elliot’s malaise, it is important to remember the performance of
identity played out through the capitalist choreography of our alpha-numeric avatars
(that is, passwords, banking information, social security numbers) waltzed through
the unseen data sphere of global digital economies. However, Stiegler notes that the
digital is a pharmakon and exists as both poison and remedy. Therefore it is the learn-
ing to think digitally that might resist the sacrifice of the data subjects’ know-how in
the postdigital culture.
The trajectory of theatre and performance practice and theory since the Theatre Journal
special issue on “Theatre and Technology” extends across the concerns over ontologi-
cal questions and the explorations of innovative aesthetic techniques, and toward the
“reality of the virtual,” which exhibits similar obstacles, be they political, social, or eco-
nomic, as that of the “real.” Therefore when we imagine how theatre and performance
is challenged, extended, and remade in light of various technological advancements, it
is useful to remember the capacity of the digital to accelerate real-world abuse, control,
and power. That is an important task that any postdigital performance can undertake
among the debris and aftermath and thinking of the digital bomb.

44 
“Eps 1.0_hellofriend.mov,” Mr. Robot, directed by Niels Arden Oplev (Universal Cable Produc-
tions, USA Network, 2015).