The Relocation of Theatre: Making UNMAKEABLELOVE

Abstract

This paper addresses the histories of liveness and performance and of the life of machines by articulating theoretical positions on Samuel Beckett’s prose work The Lost Ones in relation to a recent new media work UNMAKEABLELOVE (Kenderdine and Shaw, 2008). Beckett’s prose has been interpreted by a number of leading scholars including Lyotard (‘systematic madness’), Schwab (‘soulmaking’) and Porush (Beckett’s ‘cybernetic machine’) who envision the texts’ narrative agency as ‘a disembodied artificial intelligence’ exploring the boundaries between the human and post-human. This paper examines these topics through references to the histories of Automaton Theater, figurative actors, computational agents, the pioneering interactive installation POINTS OF VIEW (Shaw, 1983) and the seminal Mabou Mines theatrical production of The Lost Ones (1975). UNMAKEABLELOVE advances the practices of algorithmic agency, artificial life, virtual communities, human computer interaction, augmented virtuality, mixed reality, multimedia performance to engage ‘the body’s primordial inscriptions’ (Schwab, 2000, p. 16). It focuses and makes interactively tangible a state of confrontation and interpolation between our selves and a virtual society that is operating in a severe state of physical and psychological entropy. Its mixed reality strategies of embodied simulation intricately engage the presence and agency of the viewer, and impel them to experience the anomalies of a perceptual disequilibrium that directly implicates them in an alienated and claustrophobic situation.