Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Introduction: Perhaps the Medium-Specificity of the Contemporary Performing Arts is Mutation?
- Theatre Between Performance and Installation: Three Contemporary Belgian Examples
- The Fourth Wall, or the Rift Between Citizen and Government: Another Attempt at a Conceptual Synthesis of Theatre and Politics
- Using Recorded Images for Political Purposes
- A Campsite for the Avant-Garde and a Church in Cyberspace: Christoph Schlingensief ’s Dialogue with Avant-Gardism
- Echoes from the Animist Past: Abattoir Fermé’s Dark Backward and Abysm of Time
- Folding Mutants or Crumbling Hybrids?: Of Looking Baroque in Contemporary Theatre and Performance
- Making UNMAKEABLELOVE: The Relocation of Theatre
- Witness Protection?: Surveillance Technologies in Theatrical Performance
- The Work of Art in the Age of Its Intermedial Reproduction: Rimini Protokoll’s Mnemopark
- Rimini Protokoll’s Theatricalization of Reality
- Digital Landscapes: The Meta-Picturesque Qualities of Kurt d’Haeseleer’s Audiovisual Sceneries
- The Productivity of the Prototype: On Julien Maire’s ‘Cinema of Contraptions’
- The Theatre of Recorded Sound and Film: Vacating Performance in Michael Curran’s Look What They Done To My Song
- Doubled Bodies and Live Loops: On Ragnar Kjartansson’s Mediatized Performances
- Between Solitaire and a Basketball Game: Dramaturgical Strategies in the Work of Antonia Baehr
- Index of Subjects
- Index of Names
Digital Landscapes: The Meta-Picturesque Qualities of Kurt d’Haeseleer’s Audiovisual Sceneries
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 03 February 2021
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Introduction: Perhaps the Medium-Specificity of the Contemporary Performing Arts is Mutation?
- Theatre Between Performance and Installation: Three Contemporary Belgian Examples
- The Fourth Wall, or the Rift Between Citizen and Government: Another Attempt at a Conceptual Synthesis of Theatre and Politics
- Using Recorded Images for Political Purposes
- A Campsite for the Avant-Garde and a Church in Cyberspace: Christoph Schlingensief ’s Dialogue with Avant-Gardism
- Echoes from the Animist Past: Abattoir Fermé’s Dark Backward and Abysm of Time
- Folding Mutants or Crumbling Hybrids?: Of Looking Baroque in Contemporary Theatre and Performance
- Making UNMAKEABLELOVE: The Relocation of Theatre
- Witness Protection?: Surveillance Technologies in Theatrical Performance
- The Work of Art in the Age of Its Intermedial Reproduction: Rimini Protokoll’s Mnemopark
- Rimini Protokoll’s Theatricalization of Reality
- Digital Landscapes: The Meta-Picturesque Qualities of Kurt d’Haeseleer’s Audiovisual Sceneries
- The Productivity of the Prototype: On Julien Maire’s ‘Cinema of Contraptions’
- The Theatre of Recorded Sound and Film: Vacating Performance in Michael Curran’s Look What They Done To My Song
- Doubled Bodies and Live Loops: On Ragnar Kjartansson’s Mediatized Performances
- Between Solitaire and a Basketball Game: Dramaturgical Strategies in the Work of Antonia Baehr
- Index of Subjects
- Index of Names
Summary
Digital Landscapes
Theatre that incorporates other media into its performance space is as old as Greek tragedy. The integration of word, music, image and gesture in one frame presupposes theatre as the intermedial art practice par excellence. That is at least the basic argument of the Theatre and Intermediality Research Working Group, substantiated in their first publication (Chapple & Kattenbelt 2006). Theatre, in Kattenbelt's formulation, has a distinctive capacity to be a ‘hypermedium’ that is able to ‘stage’ other mediums (ibid. 37). As the ‘stage of intermediality’, theatre mutates media into mixed forms that both thematize and question the role of media in our contemporary mediatized culture (ibid. 38). However, the mutating paradigm of the present issue of Theater Topics works in two directions and can be understood as the mutual interference and contamination of different media into ‘new’ or hybrid forms that are hard to categorize. In a text on hybrid art, Elke Van Campenhout, a Belgium-based freelance dramaturge and researcher, distinguishes ‘mutants’ and ‘monsters’ as two variations of a contemporary artistic practice operating in the grey zone between performance and visual arts, between science and the gallery. ‘Mutants’ are types of work that abandon their disciplinary frames, but at the same time (and by doing this) they inquire, question and reinforce the existing disciplines. The second category she characterizes as ‘monsters’: artworks as a hotchpotch of elements that by no means refer to a particular discipline or identity (Van Campenhout 2008).
The versatile artistic practice of Kurt d’Haeseleer (1974) exemplifies the difficulty, even the impossibility, of cataloguing this kind of hybrid work into one particular discipline, resulting in both mutants and monsters. With a background as a video artist, d’Haeseleer designs visual machineries by combining elements of painting, video clips, cinema, performance and installation art. After his studies at Sint-Lukas (Brussels), he was invited by Peter Missotten to join the collective De Filmfabriek. Recently this collective mutated into DE WERKTANK, a factory for new and old media art, which is coordinated by d’Haeseleer and Ief Spincemaille.
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- Information
- Bastard or Playmate?Adapting Theatre, Mutating Media and Contemporary Performing Arts, pp. 161 - 177Publisher: Amsterdam University PressPrint publication year: 2012