Timeline

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Responding to developments in digital culture today, Performance and Digital Culture has shifted its focus across time, from documenting the pandemic to critically reflecting on LLMs.

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The OSUN Performance and Digital Culture has been run since 2021 with various focus themes across first two and later six partner campuses. Initially, in 2021, the focus lay on the pandemic and its effects on the performance arts. More recently, the course has promoted a broader understanding of performance and digitality by asking: how do networked performance experiences alter social and cultural functions of theatre? Students investigate the relation between digital culture and performing arts at a point in time when digital technology impacts our daily lives, social relationships, global monetary conditions and power relations more than ever before.

Our Story

Over the Years

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2021

(Post)Pandemic Theatre

Originally entitled (Post)Pandemic Theater, the course ran in Bard Annandale and Bard Berlin campuses and focussed on the profound impact of the COVID-19 pandemic on the performing arts. Using case studies from US and Germany, the course aimed to study how the performing arts had fundamentally altered their reach, audience, institutional structures, and the quality of social encounter by going digital. It investigated how these changes challenged established ideas of theater’s liveness, physicality and communality.

The course ran alongside the applied research project Viral Theatres, funded by the VolkswagenFoundation and also received a development grant from the Experimental Humanities Collaborative Network (EHCN).

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2022

Digital Theatres

Building on the fundamental collaborative aspect of the 2021 course which enabled students to learn together across cultural and physical distances, the course was adopted by the Open Society University Network (OSUN) as an Network Collaborative Course (NCC) under the new title Digital Theatres. As an NCC course, it ran in a hybrid format with student cohorts both meeting locally on their campuses and connecting in digital sessions with one another. The focus shifted to highlight creative collaborations across geographies–notably the Global South–and the development of a Living Archive of student works. Students from six campuses across the world collaborated across difference and distance in the study and creation of digital theatre works. The collaborating campuses were: Bard College, Annandale, USA; Bard College, Berlin, Germany; Central European University, Vienna, Austria; Universidad de los Andes, Bogotá, Colombia; University of Witwatersrand, Johannesburg, South Africa; and Birkbeck, University of London, UK.

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2023

Digital Theatres II

The course, now changing its name to Performance and Digital Culture, continued as an NCC with the same partners and emphasized more in-depth collaboration between campuses by pairing campuses to work together throughout the entire semester. A series of workshops with guest artists allowed students to hone their digital skills with professional artists to devise their own creative performances. The course continued refining its focus on the creation of digital theatre works. It also expanded to novel topics such as generative AI, critically questioning the commercialisation of digital culture and the digital industry’s inherent biases and opacities.
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2024

Performance and Digital Culture

In January 2024, select students from the 2023 cohort were able to join an OSUN-funded week-long intensive in Bogotà, in which students from 10 countries created the live-stream performance “Why Dig up Graves?” that was presented to in-person and online audiences. The week-long intensive was enabled by an additional grant scheme for student mobility offered by OSUN.

In the Fall Semester 2024, the NCC course continues with the two Global South campuses of Universidad de los Andes and University of Witwatersrand. The unique positionality of these spaces provides a fertile ground for the creation of collaborative digital theater works which explore the unique circumstances of these two vibrant cultures and promotes a dialogue across geographies.

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