Internet theatre and the historical consciousness of the Covid-19 era

Abstract

ABSTRACT The pandemic is creating the conditions for a new telos of globalisation to emerge in humanity’s historical consciousness, which is not expressed in ideological terms, but is instead rendered as a fluid reality of corporeality and virtuality structured by the materialism of the Internet. Internet theatre created during the pandemic functions as a metonym for the transformation of the human subject from corporeal flesh to bio-techno hybrids. To Be a Machine (Version 1.0) (Dead Centre 2020), End Meeting for All (Forced Entertainment 2020) and Rich Kids: A History of Shopping Malls in Tehran (2021) are used as case studies in this article to show how today’s informational environment augments perceptions of the real in performance through the convergence of media formats, including the fleshy human. This analysis is contextualised from the historical perspective of the post-Cold War period when anxieties about cultural homogeneity and assimilation were prominent themes in theatre and performance discourse in the absence of any viable alternative teleology to Western capitalism.