Multimedia Dramaturgy

Ecco una traduzione accademica e accurata del programma, pensata per un contesto di studi performativi e media digitali in lingua inglese.

Bodies, Screens, Algorithms: When the Stage Becomes a Network
This course investigates the transformation of the scenic body and the performative image in the age of the network and artificial intelligence, starting from an open question: what remains of the stage when the technological device is no longer a simple tool, but an environment, an infrastructure, and a system of relations that redefines spaces, languages, dramaturgies, and artistic practices?

The curriculum reconstructs the development of technological performance from the 1980s to the present, following three major historical and technological thresholds that intersect throughout the semester: video theater and interactivity (from "tecnoteatro" to interactive installations and online performance); video mapping and immersive technologies (augmented and virtual stages and contemporary hybrid practices); and artificial intelligence (from algorithmic theater to generative AI, and the ethical and cultural issues it raises). A transversal theme is digital artivism: the intersection of art, activism, and networks, from the early forms of 1990s hacktivism to the most recent cases of artists using the languages of the network and digital media as a space for political and civil intervention. The course is not chronological but organized by thematic threads that echo and overlap throughout the semester. The provided bibliography serves as the foundation for the lectures.

Thematic Threads
Thread 1 - Core Module: Mediaturgies: The Body in the Screen, the Screen in the Body (12 hours)
From the notion of "mediaturgy" (Marranca) to contemporary hybrid practices: Studio Azzurro, Motus, Robert Lepage, Michele Sambin/Tam Teatro Musica, Bob Wilson, Kamilia Kard, William Kentridge, and Es Devlin. This section examines the performer/machine relationship as a way to transcend the dialectic between theater and technology.

Thread 2 - Poor Technology: The Artist's Material Independence (6 hours)
"Poor" or manual technology as a condition for artistic and political autonomy. The case of Giacomo Verde and video-activism. The gesture of subtracting the image from aestheticization.

Thread 3 - Artivism and Hacktivism: The Network as Art and Conflict (6 hours)
Netstrike, Hackmeeting, Tactical Media, Critical Art Ensemble: the origins of Italian digital artivism in the 1990s and 2000s. The thread opens to the present, observing how art and digital activism continue to intertwine today through the case of Tania Bruguera and INSTAR (Instituto de Artivismo Hannah Arendt).

Thread 4 - Power, Materiality, and Resistance in Artificial Intelligence (6 hours)
A materialist critique of commercial AI: infrastructures, invisible labor, environmental costs, and the rhetoric of technological marketing.

Thread 5 - The Algorithmic Stage: Theater Put to the AI Test (6 hours)
Dramaturgies generated by algorithms, and theater as a critical space for resisting technological determinism. This is a field still lacking a structured Italian bibliography—students are invited to contribute to building it.

Theater Archives: Performing the Archive
Performance studies have long begun to question what happens when the archival device does more than just preserve a body that has performed; when it becomes the site where an action can be re-enacted. Reflecting on the contemporary choreographic revival of historical dance works, André Lepecki has proposed thinking of the body itself as an archive: not an inert medium on which traces are deposited, but an active surface capable of "will to re-enact" what had seemingly disappeared along with the event that generated it. A similar perspective, albeit focused on a different historical corpus, is that of Branislav Jakovljević, who, working on the legacy of second-half 20th-century happenings, proposed understanding certain performative acts as "lasting acts"—acts that persist not because they are documented, but because their very structure makes them reactivatable in subsequent historical contexts, capable of generating new iterations without coinciding with a simple citation of the original gesture.

Both perspectives shift the problem of the archive from a matter of documentary preservation to one of embodied transmission. They prepare the ground for recognizing that questioning the possibility of "performing an archive" means, first and foremost, rejecting the idea that it is a simple metaphorical operation. It is not about "making alive" what is dead, nor about scenically animating content given elsewhere. Rather, it is about recognizing that the archive carries within itself, from its very inception, a latent performative dimension. Performing the archive, in this sense, is not to betray its nature, but to bring it to a further degree of explicitness.

Note: Please refer to the website annamonteverdi.it and the "Drammaturgia multimediale" playlist on the Anna Maria Monteverdi YouTube channel for further resources.