Conclusion: Posthuman Corporealities and Augmented Spaces [As theatre and performance continue to engage a digital aesthetic, char- acteristics from the world of media art such as intermediality, immer- sion, and interactivity become more relevant to the understanding and experience of performance. Theatrical forms become more open, they develop more complex interactive features and are therefore more sus- ceptible to mutability and reformation. Their structures take shape out of the negotiation between the participant and the configuration of ele- ments within the work. It falls to the spectator to enter into a conversa- tion with the work and in doing so complete it, forming a continually Giorninliploma he teopcrormn sce sare fe the spectator moves centre stage, the performer in multimedia work must adapt to the convergence of media and live performance, must balance their own embodiment and the increasingly virtual spaces it inhabits. [As performance increasingly assimilates multimedia technologies and artists progressively explore intermedial, even telematic performance spaces, the position of the performer as defining the essence of theatre as a medium, or the ontology of performance in theatre, is changing. Tori Haring-Smith posits that the current attention to media spectacle is dis- tracting theatre ‘from its essential cask of bringing a live human actor together with a live human spectator to explore issues of common con- cern’ (Haring-Smith, 2002, p. 100). The live performer has previously been viewed as defining theatre, their physicality the ultimate means of expression. The corporeality of the actor has been the foundational site ‘of meaning in performance, and the body the essential medium of com- munication within the hypermedium of theatre. However, as this body’ is being remediated, relocated and reframed, the corporeal dimension in multimedia theatre is being transferred from the body of the performer to the body of the spectator. The distinction between a material performer, a mediated performer, and a digitally con- stituted virtual performer is becoming less vital, as the perception of these ‘media as separate and ontologically discrete channels is waning, Rather, 204Conclusion 205 ‘with multimedia theatre embracing an‘aesthetic of unfinish’ (Lunenfeld), and demanding the sensual engagement of the audience, the perform- ance occurs not only at the site of its transmission, but also at the site of its reception. This reception is an embodied reception that approaches the condition of posthuman embodiment: part actual/part virtual, part material/part information due to the positioning of the spectator’s body between these domains. This experience of the virtual, for the spectator as for the performer, problematises the parameters of their own sense of ‘presence’. By presenting these two entities alongside one another multi- media theatre-makers force a comparison of the different ways in which participants connect with the material and the virtual. Not merging man with machine, but problematising perceptions regarding the body and enabling the experience of new forms of embodiment and subjectivity. With performance embracing a multimedial aesthetic, performance analysis too must reflect a multimedial, paradigmatic focus. A “reading” of performance through the Hayles dialectic of pattern and random- ness, as opposed to presence and absence, provides one avenue leading away from humanist limitations and acknowledges the post-humanism ‘of contemporary multimedial performance. A post-humanist perspective recognises the body itself as ‘unfinished’, as open to the world, with its boundaries altered by technologies, objects, and other animals. A post- humanist reading of performance does not focus on one element of the performance such as the body of the performer, but views performance as a multimedial system that is accessed by the body of the audience member, a body that is open to the work and affected by the work Virtuality and/augmented reality ‘Most of the multimedia performance practices discussed in this book do not attempt to relocate the performance experience entirely into the virtual as in Second Life or computer-gaming environments. The artists we have focused on do not construct an alternative space or time that requires the suspension of disbelief for participants to engage fully with the work. In works such as Wages of Spin, 40 Part Motet and Modell 5, the artists discussed in this book work instead to overlay patterns onto the actual ‘environment inhabited by the participant. Virtual reality requires the par- ticipant to experience only a strong sense of immediacy’, while multimedia performance is functioning to create both immediacy and ‘hypermediacy’. Even in cinematic new media performance such as Eavesdrop, the par- ticipant does not become transported into another world, but is continu- ‘ously panning across the surface of a virtual world from a distance, and the nature of the audience interaction functions to emphasise the single206 Multimedia Performance dimensionality of the screen. While users can ‘zoom’ in to the view the ‘interior landscapes’ of the presented characters, this serves to highlight the opacity of the medium and the nature of the work as hypermedial, as able to link separate media elements to one another. The user navigates the imagery, piecing together the various components as they restructure the composition. In Blast Theory’s Can You See Me Now?, which involyes the participant navigating a virtual space accessed online, the constructed space is not a fully realised virtual reality requiring the suspension of disbelief, but exactly corresponds to a real city. The participants in this piece are effectively tracing a map of an actual physical space. It is the connection between the virtual map and the real space it represents that produces the multimedial effect of Can You See Me Now? Similarly, while ‘immersion’ is a key characteristic of contemporary multimedia theatre, this quality does not tend to manifest in multimedia theatre as immersion in a virtual world. ‘Immersion in a virtual world’ may imply either the cognitive transposition of the self into a purely fictional space constructed upon the architecture of language or the transposition of the self into a computer-generated space built on the architecture of digital code. Immersion in a virtual reality involves an imagined sense of changing one’s actual physical location into a differ- ent location, about exchanging real space for virtual space. Immersive multimedia works are embracing an aesthetic of Virtual Reality in the sense that they are extending and augmenting the experience of actual reality, of being’ in an immediate present with enhanced visual scope For example, the work of companies that bring media into the theatri- cal frame ~ such as Lightwork, Version 1.0, The Builders Association, and The Toneelgroep — utilise media as dramaturgical tools, emphasising themes and narrative elements. Here onstage media can function both within a diegetic world and simultaneously as a hypermedial element distancing the audience from this world. ‘Multimedia performance-makers have embraced an aesthetic of virtual reality insofar as it reflects a rejection of the thetorics of presence that have limited the theoretical discussion of theatre Practice to an archive of dramatic forms. The move from presence to pattern in multimedia theatre is responding to the convergence of materiality and information in the ‘Virtual’ aesthetic. This move from presence to pattern in theatre practice is literally enacted in the move into virtual spaces. However, ‘multimedia theatre-makers also display a marked resistance to the virtual as an experience of disembodiment, and explore the perception ‘that materiality is being interpenetrated by informational pattern’ (Hayles), not rejecting materiality but manifesting the fundamental principle of the condition of Virtuality: that information and material are not per= ceived as discrete entities. Multimedia performance-makers are playing