written by Paolo Atzori - 1995

Theatron
Notes on Electronic Scenography
the design of digital environments

"La philosophie et le theatre sont lies dans une affinite turbulente et insistente: ces deux
experiences ne privilegent-elles pas une certaine autorite de la presence et de la visibilite?
...Mais si, depuis toujours l'invisible travaille le visible, si par exemple la visibilite du visible
- ce qui rend visible la chose visible - n'est pas visible, alors une certaine nuit vient creuser
d'abime la presentation meme du visible. Elle vient laisser place, dans la representation de
soi, a cette parole par essence invisible, venue du dessous du visible"
(J. DERRIDA)

Media technologies involve a changing paradigm of human perception,

broadening our senses and giving shape to previously invisible phenomena.
The strategy pursued by Electronic Scenography shrinks both issues of
representation of the information age with a    coherent transformation of the
stage.
To investigate into communications potentials and new perceptual dimensions in
contemporary set design means to study ”event-structures” consisting of light,
sound, movement, data: the new complexity of the artistic activity, the possibility
to develop a ‘hypertextual dramaturgy’ considering networks as the place for
representing dis-located events.

One of the main goals of ”Electronic Scenography” is, in a factual

interdisciplinary attitude, to implement a platform for an effective artistic synergy;
to provide a framework for new forms of representation as dynamical synthesis
of free reflections on the contemporary transformations inducing a transversal
crossing of different artistic expressions.

This new discipline originates with the creation of ”Ex Machina”, the
audiovisual ballet of Frédéric Flamand/Fabrizio Plessi coproduced by
Charleroi/Danses and the Kunsthochschule für Medien Köln in 1994.
The work was conceived as a reflection on several aspects idiosyncratic of
western society.
One of these is the television world which for many people corresponds to
reality. The leading idea is to present together with the obvious ”realism” of
television images some abstract studies on the actuality of the electronic
colours, the basic constituents of the TV signal and to integrate on an
aesthetic level these images with the dynamic of the dancers.
Like zapping into daily life we can find in this work traces of what could be
a ”Mythology” of our time, fragmented actions in which the direct
relationship with ”history” is transferred to the portrayal of events of our
every day life located in the unusual environment of an abandoned
swimming pool, thought as ideal vehicle of the highly structured media
fluidity.

”In a mediated world there are no longer places in the sense we once knew them”. (Peter
Eisenmann)

”ULYSSES/~KÖLN” represents the basic material for the future project of

”Electronic Scenography” to be realised in Cologne. Embodied on a track of free
reflections about the topic of ”PLACE” as metaphor of an ”interior stage”
elaborated by the students, who were asked first to find out a place in Cologne
to which they could relate their artistical sensibility and to find    there out the
”genius loci”, the specifical energy corresponding to the place chosen.

Having in mind the Renaissance staging, fully integrated in the city, or better in
a ”Piazza” of the city and reconsidering the aspects of cultural production to
perform a real popular spectacle, the primary aim of ”ULYSSES/~KÖLN”    is to
expand the ”territory” of stage design into the area of social environments,
rejecting the idea of working in established contexts.

The Medienpark Hotel represents the intriguing concept of ”Ruin of the Future”.
A ”ghost hotel” in the supposed ”directional” urban area for the post-industrial
economic reconversion of Cologne. For several years the building has been
suspended; this limbic architecture exists unfinished, without a function, like a
car without the engine. A concrete’s set of 70 boxes, with 70 related black holes.
In our project the building is re-considered as a breached space for the disunity
of the digital age, a modifiable container of a representative environment for a
contemporary Ulysses, a traveler into the processes of communication and
information.

The line we are following is to consider this space as a real database, for a
hypertextual dramaturgy where the information can be structured following the
characteristic tree organization of the UNIX system.
Ideally the hotel should be converted into a digital set supporting interactive
environments for on-line actors.

A parallel aspect of this research is to experiment with ‘visual language’ starting

from a free associative process based on ”images agentes”, no one subordinate
to the others, ”shadows of ideas” projected on a unstable digital support and the
possibility to cross, overlap, superimpose, to combine them in a operative
matrix, a digital storyboard, originating further levels of meaning in a sort
of .”Stream of Consciousness” with the desire to ”contribute to the fabrication
on new assemblages    of enunciation...”(F. Guattari)