Digital Baroque: Via Viola or the Passage of Theatricality

Such are the principal traits by which musicologists have been unable to define a Baroque music: music as expressive represent-ation, expression here referring to feeling as if to an affect of accord. What has happened to cause the answer—or rather, the quite diverse range of answers—to change since the Baroque musicians? Solutions no longer pass through accords. It is because the conditions of the problem itself have changed: we have a new Baroque and a neo-Leibnizianism. The same construction of the point of view over the city continues to be developed, but now it is neither the same point of view nor the same city, now that both the figure and the ground are in movement in space. Something has changed in the situation of monads... To the degree that the world is now made up of divergent series (the chaosmos), or that crapshooting replaces the game of Plenitude, the monad is now unable to contain the entire world as if in a closed circle that can be modified by projection.

— Gilles Deleuze, The Fold: Leibniz and the Baroque

Consider the paradoxical situation of theatricality as it moves into the twenty-first century. Enhanced by the dazzling images of computer wizardry and the magical resonance of digitized sound, the public appeal of spectacle might never have been stronger. And yet, behind this appeal lies something resistant to the discordant politics and erotics of theatricality associated with the postmodern age. The resistance reflects a certain desire or nostalgia for simpler times and less complicated world views than those wrought by the divergent narratives of identity and difference prevalent in the dramatic practice and theory of the past few decades. Particularly in the digitized arena of electronic installation and performance, artists as divergent in form and vision as Bill Viola and Daniel Reeves have been calling for a unifying, spiritualizing aesthetic in contrast to the shifting postmodern terrain of politics and identity. The artistic call for a spectacle of comforting accord openly disavows the poststructural legacy of dissonance and divergence for the purpose of regaining something of a universal and univocal point of view, whether of a chapel ceiling, a domestic interior, an urban panorama, or a singular body floating in virtual space. It is almost as if the allure of the clean lines and stark simplicity of much digital spectacle harks back to a calming notion of representational accord, one prevalent since the advent of Renaissance single-point perspective. Such a drive for the theatricality of accord, for the display of a new/old world order, depends on the reanchoring of representation in the certainty of analogy and resemblance, in the metaphysics of point of view.

Baroque Show

It is in this context that a wide range of recent projects in video and electronic art have engaged in an energetic dialogue with Renaissance and Baroque constructions of space, light, passion, memory, and utopia. But while many electronic artists embrace earlier historical models of representation in order to frame their work in a discourse of interiority, mysticism, spirituality, and utopia, others look back to the past not to forget dissonance, but to articulate its prominence in neoBaroque paradigms of artistic place, subjective space, and political practice. A poignant testimony of the promise of such an approach is voiced by the political video installation artist, Francesc Torres. In describing his video installation, El Carro de Fenc (1991), he understands his combined reflection on Bosch, the decline of monastic power, and the tragedy of Tiananmen Square in terms of his reassessment of his previous avant-garde rejection of the past: "After having dissected the butterfly with a hammer, I plunged into the terrifying task of putting its viscera back together again under a microscope... one also discovers that what is lived through the experience of others means that events older than ourselves can speak to us with the tangibility and eloquence of the physical, of the present" (52, 53). As...