Dark Room/Gray Scale/White Noise

Dark Room/Gray Scale/White Noise is a first attempt to answer some very large questions. What does it mean to create live theatre in an era of virtuality? How are the new media of simulation shaping what theatre artists do and theatre audiences experience? How should the wider cultural effects of these media be reflected in our art? How can we use that art to reflect upon them in turn? How do you create digital theatre?

Dark Room/Gray Scale/White Noise depends on new technology for its realization-specifically, a digital platform enabling performers to interact with a computer generated and controlled image score. This real-time interactivity, which effectively makes projected images performers in their own right, is an essential feature of Dark Room's theatrical language.

As a writer for theatre, I believe developments in interactive multimedia systems offer me extraordinary creative resources, whole new expressive vocabularies. Yet for all its possibilities, and Dark Room only begins to explore a single application, I find the technology itself less compelling than the new imaginative and perceptual terrains it is creating. The world of Dark Room/Gray Scale/White Noise is the mind-place in which we lose ourselves beyond-or behind-the computer screen, a place of fragments and links, discontinuities and associations, of transmuting, ephemeral texts, sounds and images. It is a virtual world of apparently unlimited potential, yet one haunted by the spectre of irremediable loss--of wholeness, of presence, and of the material reality of the body itself.

The structure of Dark Room-discrete titled nodes, shards of images, dialogue and action whose connecting links depend largely on the viewer's own construction--has been directly inspired by hypertext fiction. The use of (projected) texts as animated presences in performance stems from my fascination with the animation and fluidity of electronic language, the luminous words that float, dissolve, multiply, and transform in the mind-theatre of hypermedia. More generally, the digital form's seamless integration of multiple modes-its interweaving of sound, image, and text-provides the formal model for my "digital theatre" experiment.

Is there an irony to publishing this text in the old fixed medium of print? Yes, one I've been wrestling with since beginning work on this project. The closer I come to realizing my artistic ambitions for Dark Room/Gray Scale/White Noise, the more the performance text exceeds the boundaries of print and page, the limits of writing itself. It is not merely that Dark Room relies heavily on non-verbal elements, but that the relationship in time and space between its multiple modes is crucial to its form and meaning. A simple way to convey the dilemma is to note how important simultaneity, overlap, repetition and dissolve-the temporal modes of memory, fantasy, and dream-are to the structure of Dark Room as well as the content of its imagery, and how difficult it is to represent this within existing (print) conventions. So difficult, in fact, that I've chosen not to do so, with the result that the printed text is, in crucial ways, radically incomplete.

There is, of course, an obvious solution. It seems increasingly clear that the digital theatre texts I am imagining themselves require a digital form. And I am experimenting with an electronic script project that I hope will provide just that, with all the challenges that presents to familiar ideas of playwriting and reading (both my own and other people's). Yet I find myself reluctant to abandon fixed print entirely, however problematic. And I realize it's precisely because it is problematic. The tension between old format and new form is proving unexpectedly creative, reminding me of the ineffability that is the essence of performance. Strange as it seems, my turn to new media has returned me to a fuller vision of theatre. These fixed black marks on white ground stand, in their very insufficiency and fixity, as signs for a...