This website showcases experiments with Digital Performance, created by students and faculty of the network collaborative university course Performance and Digital Culture.
The course has run in OSUN Open Society University Network institutions across three continents from 2021 onwards.
We ask how can theatre work with, reflect on, and challenge an increasingly digitized world? So at the course:
We showcase the effort of faculty, students, and institutions to bridge geographies and time zones to create a digital creative hub.
We investigate how newly dispersed digital formats have expanded our idea of theatre and have equally challenged established digital practices.
We ask how these new networked performance experiences have altered common social and cultural functions of theatre.
Taking the COVID-19 pandemic as a starting point, students engaged in theory and practice to investigate how theatre and performance as live embodied practices and forms of communal encounter have permanently changed due to extended lockdowns, social distancing, and health restrictions. Equally, they used artistic methods to examine the encounter between technology and politics, most notably with AI in performance. The students’ artistic projects with digitality and theatre lie at the heart of our project.
As a Network Collaborative Course with several campuses concurrently teaching the same syllabus, the Performance and Digital Culture Course foregrounds a learning experience that is based on the diversity of perspectives, experiences and approaches students and faculty contribute.
Our students from radically different cultural contexts and based in six campuses came together – in both local and remote sessions – to compare their experiences of the impact that digitality has on society at large.
In addition to the core hybrid course model, the Performance and Digital Culture course also invited a series of established digital performance arts makers to share their practice with the students in intensive digital workshop formats. Mixed student groups from all campuses explored ideas such as Zoom theatres, GPS in performance, or queering VR.
This Open Society University Network Collaborative Course initiative was conceived by Ramona Mosse and Nina Tecklenburg from Bard College Berlin, growing out of their VolkswagenFoundation funded artistic research project Viral Theatres, which documented shifts in artistic work processes during the COVID-19 theatre closures. The core research team is a diverse cohort of interdisciplinary artists, researchers and artist/researchers.
The research project built the starting point for the exploration of our collaborative teaching model.
