Digital Culture & AudioVisual Challenges

Contemporary theatre is more and more frequently using cinema as well as the emerging new technologies; incorporating them in it as a part of its set design and stage direction. 

While artists are researching the relationship between theatre and cinema, a new form of art emerges and is widely embraced and presented in the European theatres, mainly through the set design transformed gradually into a new kind of scenography. In many ways, new media did promise a new holistic art, as Randall Packer and Ken Jordan claimed early on the new millennial, and it is currently presented on stage as a new multi sensory spectacle (as the French would call it) that incorporates all, or almost all, forms of art. 

In this meeting of arts and technology, this new scenography, mentioned above, needs to be explored: what are the new requirements for a set designer? Are there any new rules that should apply in this new form of set design art? Can we attempt a categorisation / classification needed to understand this new scenography?

This paper aspires to present the early work of a long process of an overview of the European spectacles that incorporate the new technologies in such way that a new form of art is created; this work will thus show us the characteristics of each category. 

The main axe for this categorisation is, of course, the dramaturgy. From the way each story is narrated, three categories of scenography become clear to us: the one that supports the narration, the one that is independent of any other narration, and the one that is by itself  the narration. 

These three categories are analysed and researched through a set of examples illustrating each category. 

Other factors that are to be taken into consideration are the aesthetics of art, the difference between the process of the artist and the final product, and how having the one or the other as a goal can change the outcome, the evolution of technology making things unimaginable in the past, possible for the contemporary artists, and last but not least  the ethics to be considered. 

The main questions we are going to attempt to address are the following : Does technology enhance the experience of the spectator? What does this new art provide us with and what are the risks of creating a multi sensory spectacle that resembles our screens?